On English Wikipedia, and likely elsewhere, old discussions on talk pages are moved to a subpage of the talk page, often automatically by bots. Such pages are an archive of closed discussions and should not be edited to open new threads or reply to old ones. These pages are generally of the format "Talk:<pagename>/Archive <n>". Opening a page of this form that does not yet have any archives (ie, a non-existent page) will present the user with a "start a discussion" button. This is an error since it is encouraging the user to do something that is against protocol and convention.
List of steps to reproduce (step by step, including full links if applicable):
- For example, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Black_box/Archive_3
What happens?:
Observe that the "start a discussion" button is present. On a page with archives actually present such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Black_box/Archive_1 there is no button.
What should have happened instead?:
There should be no invitation to start a discussion. Ideally, there should be a message similar to the one on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Automatic_archive_navigator which is used on existential archive pages.
Software version (if not a Wikimedia wiki), browser information, screenshots, other information, etc.:
Firefox 101.0.1, Monobook skin (also tried default skin logged out), Windows 10 v.21H1