Update: 4-September
@Whatamidoing-WMF and I currently see three potential next steps en route to our larger objective of making the Reply Tool available as a Beta Feature people across all projects:

• Approach #1: make the tool available at a small number of large wikis (as defined by the number of active editors)
• Approach #2: make the tool available at wikis with known language complexities [i]
• Approach #3: make the tool available at small-to-medium size wikis with no language complexities

Next week, the week of 8-Sep (7-Sep is a staff holiday), we will pick an approach.

i. "Language complexities" in the context refers to languages that fit into categories like the ones listed below; thank you to @Pginer-WMF and @Amire80 for their advice.

• Languages with unusual font sizing
• Languages with a lot of diacritics
• Languages that have rare fonts that were relatively recently added to Unicode
• Languages where one key press may modify existing characters

Update: 11-Sep
Yesterday, @Whatamidoing-WMF talked more about the three approaches mentioned in T261525#6437733 and arrived at the following:

• Group 2: deploy the Reply Tool at Wikipedias that have "language complexities" like those mentioned in T261525#6437733 as well as Wikipedias who participated in the Talk page consultation. The goal of this next deployment will be to:
• Group 3: deploy the Reply Tool at small-to-medium-sized Wikipedias that do not have much language complexity (e.g. Latin scripts that can be easily machine translated)
• Group 4: deploy the Reply Tool at large Wikipedias whose scale and stage of development require 1:1 consultation with the Editing Team.
• Group 5: deploy the Reply Tool at Wikipedias that have complex "variant" software that allows editors and readers to switch between scripts
• Group 6: deploy the Reply Tool at other Wikimedia projects

The thinking above, as well as the objectives we are associated with the deployments to each of these groups are represented in the "Definitions" sheet of the Talk pages project/Scaling workbook.

Next steps

• Next week, @Whatamidoing-WMF and I will start putting together a plan for putting the above into action.

Update: 24-Sep

In T261525#6455588, @ppelberg wrote:

Next steps

• Next week, @Whatamidoing-WMF and I will start putting together a plan for putting the above into action.

On 17-Sep, @Whatamidoing-WMF met to discuss the above. During this conversation we made the following "Decisions" and defined the "Next steps" below.

Decisions

• We decided upon the selection criteria for wikis that will be a part of each of the 7 deployment groups. These selection criteria can be found in the Definitions sheet of the Talk pages project/Scaling workbook (limited access for now).
• We agreed the next set of deployments will happen no sooner than 8-October, two weeks after the Reply Tool will have been available by default at the Arabic, Czech and Hungarian Wikipedias (T249394).

Next steps

• @Whatamidoing-WMF to propose the wikis that will be a part of the following deployment "Groups": 2, 3, 4 and 5.
• @Whatamidoing-WMF to propose documentation organization so, going forward, wikis can intuitively get answers to the questions they might have without the Editing Team needing to intervene. See: T262431
• @Whatamidoing-WMF to process for what our interaction with the Group 2 wikis ought to look like before the Reply Tool is made available.