This is actually making me think more seriously about a system where site actions are shown at zero scroll (personal bar) and after article actions pass by the header they replace site actions which roll up into a single Dropbox (they are duplicated there anyway). So after the user scrolls all the actions are article actions except a single drop down with all site and personal actions in it. 

This solves both for the too many icons issue as well as icons with duplicate appearance but different function appearing next to each other. 

Also it sets us up nicely for a mode based nav bar where it is 99% relevant to the current task at hand (reading, editing, etc)

Sent while mobile

On Jan 22, 2014, at 5:09 PM, quiddity <pandiculation@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Brandon Harris <bharris@wikimedia.org> wrote:
        RE: Page actions moving into the header: (This is me collecting my comments from a meeting to this list)

        As I mentioned in yesterday’s design review, my gut instinct is that moving article actions into the header is the wrong path:

                        * I don’t think they’re needed up there. People already scroll to the top when they need these functions.
                        * I think it conflates those actions with the “personal bar” actions and creates confusion.  A primary motivation for Winter is to segregate the following types of actions:  Site actions (sidebar chrome), Content actions (page stuff), and Personal actions (user stuff).  The search box is a site affordance.  The personal actions are obviously thus.  Mixing article actions next to the personal actions seems weird to me.
                        * The point of discussion being always available is a valid one - the use case being, “I’m in this section, and I see an error, and I want to talk about it”.  However, I don’t necessarily think that dumping the user into the “master” talk page at any point is going to solve that.  A long time ago I had the idea to add a “discuss” link next to the section edit links.  This would target the specific section and create a new discussion with that title (or find an existing one) and work within that.  This is obviously something that can easily be done with Flow (though my original thoughts were with LQT).  I’m not sure it works well with Talk.  This is something I’ll want to experiment with.

I agree with those conclusions, and was getting worried about the number of icons in the current Winter headerbar, once scrolled. 7 ± 2 works.

One possibility would be replacing the current "article actions" icons in the headerbar, with a "scroll to top" button. It's a commonly requested feature, and (iirc) is generally turned down because of the sheer quantity of links that would be added, if they were attached to every section.
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