If we wanted to give people the option to use the new discussion tool on empty pages, we would need to intercept red links. We would likely still want to give people the option to use the full page editor.

Note that on English Wikipedia entry talk pages are quite rare, as even pages without any discussions still have various talk page header templates. It would be interesting to look at the stats for this in other wikis before prioritising.

3% of non-redirect mainspace pages on enwiki (176k out of 6.2M) have no corresponding talk pages. I think smaller wikis (especially wikis without article assessment) will tend to have higher percentage of mainspace pages without talks, for example it’s about two thirds on Bavarian Wikipedia and over 99% on Hungarian Wikibooks.

• enwiki
• barwiki
• huwikibooks

Please note that this doesn’t take any article definition into account, so disambiguation pages, stubs etc. all count, only (hard) redirects are exempted. But probably this better fits the purpose of this quick research than any stronger article criterion, as people may want to talk about disambiguation pages and stubs as well.

In T252902#6732847, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

3% of non-redirect mainspace pages on enwiki (176k out of 6.2M) have no corresponding talk pages.

@Tacsipacsi, before seeing the point you raised above, I hadn't considered how redirect pages might impact the data we gathered in T272657...I'm glad you decided to say something.

I did a quick check in T272657#6831797 and it appears to me that including/excluding redirects has a nominal impact on these numbers.

In T252902#6831803, @ppelberg wrote:

it appears to me that including/excluding redirects has a nominal impact on these numbers.

As far as I remember, I included this criterion because it had significant impact on some wiki—but I don’t remember on which. :( Although it’s obvious on what wikis may be a significant impact: on those that have a significant number of mainspace (or whatever namespace) redirects compared to the non-redirect pages in that namespace. But maybe I remember wrong, and there’s no significant impact indeed.

How should links to not-yet-created "Talk" / "Discussion" appear? Currently, they are red links.

It seems to me that they should also have a red link. This is an indicator for experienced users that there are no important discussions on this page. Moreover, we have a popular script that recolor links (to gray) to created discussion pages that contain only templates. Check hate.js on this page: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Самые_используемые_скрипты/Данные.