• Should an additional setting be added that enabled people to explicitly set which editing mode – source or visual – they see by default when they open the Reply Tool

What about VisualEditor’s approach? That is, a drop-down menu with options:

• Remember my last editor [default]
• Always give me the visual editor if possible (it’s always possible)
• Always give me the source editor
• Show me both editor tabs (probably not needed, DT’s mode switch is fast enough, and its use is not as diverse as the full page editors’, so people probably use only one or the other, not both regularly)

In T259943#6370194, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

• Should an additional setting be added that enabled people to explicitly set which editing mode – source or visual – they see by default when they open the Reply Tool

What about VisualEditor’s approach? That is, a drop-down menu with options:

• Remember my last editor [default]
• Always give me the visual editor if possible (it’s always possible)
• Always give me the source editor
• Show me both editor tabs (probably not needed, DT’s mode switch is fast enough, and its use is not as diverse as the full page editors’, so people probably use only one or the other, not both regularly)

@Tacsipacsi, can you share what's led you to suggest the above?

Initially, my instinct is to do what's listed under the "Initial approach" for the "Reasons" listed below. Although, I'm curious to know if you can see reasons as to why this "Initial approach" could be problematic/undesirable.

Initial approach

• Do not introduce a new Editing mode setting for the Reply Tool
• Instead, the text input mode people should see on subsequent uses of the Reply Tool should be determined by/inherited from the value set for the following setting: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing > Editor > Editing mode

Reasons

• People who have an explicit preference for which editing interface they like working in most often are likely to prefer that editing interface (in the context of the Reply Tool, the "text input mode") regardless of the context (editing content or participating in a discussion)

Updates
Below are the notes from the conversation @Esanders, @iamjessklein and I had earlier today.

• CHANGE the section title in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing from Communication tools to Talk pages
  • Rationale: people are likely to seek out these settings after encountering the Reply Tool or New Discussion Tool on a talk page. As such, we are assuming these people will be looking for a setting that contains the words "talk pages" [i] to affect the experience they have on talk pages.
• CHANGE the Reply Tool-related setting from Enable quick commenting to Enable quick replying
  • Rationale: people are likely to seek out this setting after encountering the Reply Tool and [ reply ] links on talk pages. As such, we are assuming they will be looking for a setting that contains the word "Reply" to affect the behavior of the Reply Tool and [ reply ] links.

i. We appreciate that on some wikis talk pages may be called something different.

In T259943#6425642, @ppelberg wrote:

@Tacsipacsi, can you share what's led you to suggest the above?

Initially, my instinct is to do what's listed under the "Initial approach" for the "Reasons" listed below. Although, I'm curious to know if you can see reasons as to why this "Initial approach" could be problematic/undesirable.

Initial approach

• Do not introduce a new Editing mode setting for the Reply Tool
• Instead, the text input mode people should see on subsequent uses of the Reply Tool should be determined by/inherited from the value set for the following setting: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing > Editor > Editing mode

Reasons

• People who have an explicit preference for which editing interface they like working in most often are likely to prefer that editing interface (in the context of the Reply Tool, the "text input mode") regardless of the context (editing content or participating in a discussion)

To be honest, (as far as I remember) I didn’t think about reusing the existing option at all. However, thinking about it, I still don’t think it’s a good idea:

• Practical issue: what to do with people using the Show me both editor tabs setting? Do you want to show two reply links? I don’t think it would be a good idea, as two tabs clutter the interface, while switching on-the-fly is easy and fast, so they’re not needed. If not two reply links, what interface do you want to show by default? Whichever you pick, it may be a wrong choice, and if you show the one the user used last time (i.e. same approach as with the default Remember my last editor), it’s probably just the opposite of what these users want—manual control over what editor opens, avoiding guesses by the software.
• Usage: although I don’t have accurate data, from what I see on huwiki, I feel that people using the visual mode of the reply tool hardly ever use the visual editor to edit articles, while I only use the source mode of the reply tool, but regularly use both editors to edit articles.

within a new section called Talk pages

As discussed, "Talk" should match the label we give to discussion pages on that wiki, so by default for English it is "Discussion" (as seen on en.wiktionary.org), whereas on en.wikipedia.org it is "Talk".

• The state of this new setting (Enabled / Disabled) should be inherited from Beta Features
  • Meaning: if you had the Discussion tools Beta Feature enabled at ar.wiki, the Enable quick commenting setting should be turned on by default for you.

Isn't the purpose of this ticket to enable the tool by default for everyone? In which case the setting will be enabled for everyone, not inherited from the beta feature. I'm not sure we'll be able to tell if someone enabled-then-disabled the beta feature, so if they did this, they'll probably have to do it again with the main feature. I wouldn't imagine that is a large number of people.

Engineering will check if the latter case in the comment above is possible, if we can detect if someone turned off beta feature.

In T259943#6447062, @Esanders wrote:

within a new section called Talk pages

As discussed, "Talk" should match the label we give to discussion pages on that wiki, so by default for English it is "Discussion" (as seen on en.wiktionary.org), whereas on en.wikipedia.org it is "Talk".

I'm glad you confirmed this, Ed. This was in the task description's "Requirements" section [i]; adding it to the "Behavior" section now as well to be sure.

i.

In T259943#6447761, @JTannerWMF wrote:

Engineering will check if the latter case in the comment above is possible, if we can detect if someone turned off beta feature.

This investigation is not needed at this time.

Reason
In short, the data in the PrefUpdate schema is unreliable because of a recently-discovered issue: T260867.

Context
As @MNeisler explained to me today, in order for the software to know whether someone has explicitly turned the Reply Tool off while it was a Beta Feature, the software would need to be able to depend on the data gathered through the PrefUpdate schema. Trouble is, this data is unreliable per T260867.

Impact
This all amounts to the following: until T260867 is resolved or a workaround is created, everyone at a wiki where the Reply Tool is made available as an opt-out setting (e.g.) will see the Reply Tool, even if they had previously turned the tool on and then off when it was available as a Beta Fetaure.

I've updated the task description to reflect the above.

In T259943#6447946, @ppelberg wrote:

In T259943#6447062, @Esanders wrote:

within a new section called Talk pages

As discussed, "Talk" should match the label we give to discussion pages on that wiki, so by default for English it is "Discussion" (as seen on en.wiktionary.org), whereas on en.wikipedia.org it is "Talk".

I'm glad you confirmed this, Ed. This was in the task description's "Requirements" section [i]; adding it to the "Behavior" section now as well to be sure.

Note that we can't do this automatically, it will have to be overridden on each wiki, for localisation reasons. The entire expression "Talk pages" (or "Discussion pages") has to be translated as a unit because the word "Talk" might need to use a different grammar form in this expression than in the navigation tabs. For example in Polish, "Talk" namespace is "Dyskusja", and "Talk pages" is "Strony dyskusji".

Change 626376 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; owner: Esanders):
[mediawiki/core@master] Add section heading message for "Discussion pages" section in prefs/editing

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/626376

Notice a description beneath the Enable quick replying setting that reads: Enabling this setting will show you a link to reply to talk page comments in one click. You can learn more about this feature by visiting the [feature summary](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_project/Feature_summary#Reply_Tool).

I have tweaked this slightly. Removed the repetition of "Enable" from above; changed "visit" to "read"; removed the section hash at the end of the URL as this is not compatible with Special:MyLanguage;

This will show you a link to reply to talk page comments in one click. You can learn more about this feature by reading the [https:\/\/www.mediawiki.org\/wiki\/Special:MyLanguage\/Talk_pages_project\/Feature_summary feature summary]

Change 626384 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; owner: Esanders):
[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Create preference for turning off reply tool once out of beta

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/626384

In T259943#6450465, @Esanders wrote:

I have tweaked this slightly. Removed the repetition of "Enable" from above; changed "visit" to "read"; removed the section hash at the end of the URL as this is not compatible with Special:MyLanguage;

This will show you a link to reply to talk page comments in one click. You can learn more about this feature by reading the [https:\/\/www.mediawiki.org\/wiki\/Special:MyLanguage\/Talk_pages_project\/Feature_summary feature summary]

Edits look good. Thank you for re-posting them here.

I've edited the task description to include the revised language.

I also think the feature summary page should be somewhere else on wiki, but I filed that as T262431.

Change 626376 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/core@master] Add section heading message for "Discussion pages" section in prefs/editing

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/626376

Change 626384 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Create preference for turning off reply tool once out of beta

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/626384

The new preference is visible on the beta cluster: https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing

14-Sep: update

• Per the conversation, @iamjessklein, @Esanders and I just had, Jess is going to review the below:

In T259943#6456215, @matmarex wrote:

The new preference is visible on the beta cluster: https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing

Design review will happen as part of T262988.