Thank you to @alexhollender for bringing this to my attention.

Might need to ask @Jdforrester-WMF if they can remember the context.

Because it was removed in January (to make just the Polish Wiktionary community happy, at least as evidenced on Phabricator so far) in T243723, which @AntiCompositeNumber has tagged as blocked by this task (the other way around, surely?).

We discussed this at some length, IIRC. Personally, I think it should be reverted (and perhaps even more complex config added to allow actually-not-encouraging wikis like plwiktionary to have a different experience from not-yet-fully-encouraging wikis like enwiki).

This task was created by ppelberg as a subtask of T243723. My self-reverted attempt at setting parent tasks was a result of partially misreading the task.

In T252482#6130279, @Jdforrester-WMF wrote:

Because it was removed in January (to make just the Polish Wiktionary community happy, at least as evidenced on Phabricator so far) in T243723...

Eeek, yes. In reading the response you (@Jdforrester-WMF) shared above, I'm realizing the question I asked could've been more clear...

The question I am seeking an answer to would be better articulated as: When and where was the decision made to hide the visual editor from anonymous users at English Wikipedia [and therefor led to it being impacted by the change in T243723]?

I've updated the task description to include the new wording of this question.

....T243723, which @AntiCompositeNumber has tagged as blocked by this task (the other way around, surely?).

This was my doing. It's no longer a child of T243723.

Personally, I think it should be reverted (and perhaps even more complex config added to allow actually-not-encouraging wikis like plwiktionary to have a different experience from not-yet-fully-encouraging wikis like enwiki).

Prior to reverting the change, I'd like to first understand how/why the configuration at en.wiki came to be what it is (see question above).

As for the larger point you are raising about the descriptiveness of the configurations, it does seem inappropriate for one configuration to hold meanings that seem to vary this widely.

I've done some digging in the history and it seems that the config option to disable VE for logged out users ($wgVisualEditorDisableForAnons) has never been respected when deciding to display the editor switcher or the welcome dialog, even since those features were added in 2015 (b05d9fcb0e) and 2016 (349b1f5e57), respectively. I thought that was a more recent regression.

Open questions

• 1. When and where was the decision made to hide the visual editor from anonymous users at English Wikipedia [and therefor led to it being > impacted by the change in T243723]?**

We are not aware of any existing agreements or decisions that stipulated the visual editor not be made available to logged out users at English Wikipedia in the WikiEditor's editing toolbar.

• 3. What – if any – changes should we make to the behavior this change [2] introduced?

Logged out editors of en.wiki should be able to switch to the visual editor from within the WikiEditor's editing toolbar.

The evidence that led to this change and the work involved with implementing it are in this task: T253941.

@matmarex are you able to point me to the list of projects – besides Polish Wikitionary, en.wiki and es.wiki – that were affected by 3458d8a27e5fb26643c5ffee81edf056aa962b1b?

...I ask the above in an attempt to close out the final "Open question":

2. Aside from Polish Wiktionary, what other projects were affected by this change? [2] In what ways were they affected?

It affects all projects where VisualEditor is "opt-in" per https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Rollouts, this is a complete list: https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/dblists/visualeditor-nondefault.dblist

In T252482#6225875, @matmarex wrote:

It affects all projects where VisualEditor is "opt-in" per https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Rollouts, this is a complete list: https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/dblists/visualeditor-nondefault.dblist

Roger that. Thank you, Bartosz.