Since DiscussionTools especially targets junior contributors, who are likely not to be aware of these conditions, I think the only viable solution is to let senior contributors preset the indentation style (approach #2). For the implementation, I can imagine a magic word that controls the indentation style on pages it’s embedded in.

In T263902#6496139, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

Since DiscussionTools especially targets junior contributors, who are likely not to be aware of these conditions, I think the only viable solution is to let senior contributors preset the indentation style (approach #2). For the implementation, I can imagine a magic word that controls the indentation style on pages it’s embedded in.

This is a good point; I'm glad you said something, @Tacsipacsi.

For the time being, we are not going to move forward with task and instead, consider building a new tool or enhancing the existing Reply Tool to explicitly accommodate the voting-style conversations this task was created to support. [i]

More context about this decision can be found on mw.org: Topic:Vu8z37woqb5eit3e.

i. /T259865

At ruwiki (especially), editors want to be able to decide whether to use : or * for a first reply. Is this the best task to represent that feature request?

We're creating a single central task for that: T276510: Enable people to choose asterisk or colon for indentation on a per-comment basis

At least on enwp, we could get most of the way there by just adding the following rule to the current behavior: when replying to an unindented comment, and the most recent comment that is indented precisely one level uses an asterisk (*), default to using an asterisk instead of a colon (:).

That is, given a discussion like this:

foo
*bar

replying to foo should by default use an asterisk, not a colon. This applies even if there are more comments that are indented further:

foo
*bar
*:baz

Here, replying to foo should still use an asterisk, because we're searching for the most recent comment that is indented by precisely one level (bar), not two levels (baz).

This change is independent of letting the user choose (T276510) because it only affects the default behavior. This change should be suitable for other wikis, not just enwp (although I don't know for sure!) because it has the effect of "following others' behavior" more closely.

Over on the English Wikipedia many editors (including myself) have taken to using the [Reply] tool for all replies whenever possible. The reply tool is especially great for very active discussions because it automatically resolves edit conflicts, making it useful regardless of whether you're a "junior" or "senior" contributor. I've been an editor since before the implementation of the [Reply] tool and I find it very helpful.

However, not all editors have adopted the [Reply] tool, with some preferring to insert bullet points manually because they're not supported by the tool in any way. This in turn causes frustration for editors like me, as I have to edit the page/section manually rather than being able to use the [Reply] tool because a previous contributor decided to use a bullet point. Many editors simply don't bother to follow the precedent, resulting in inconsistent changes in format.

This is more than just a nuisance or an aesthetic problem. It also causes accessibility issues. This was brought to my attention after another editor in a Request for Comments (RfC) discussion noted that blank lines inserted by editors manually editing the page to add their responses rather than just clicking [Reply], and changes from bullets to colons or vice versa can be interpreted by screen reading software as the start of a new list rather than a continuation of an existing thread, resulting in disruptive announcements which interrupt listening through the discussion.

For active discussions, having to use the editor rather than the [Reply] tool to continue using bullet points in a discussion thread also results in lots of unnecessary edit conflicts that have to be manually resolved.

I'd very much appreciate if support for bullet points could be added in some form to alleviate these problems. I would rather this be implemented either by allowing editors to choose how to indent their replies (approach 1) or having the [Reply] automatically continue the format of the preceding reply chain. Overriding the default for the whole page with a hidden magic word (approach 2) is just unnecessary and isn't necessarily desirable (for example, in an RfC style discussion it may be desirable for the survey section to use bullets while the discussion section uses colons).

Apologies for the long message, but I hope this feedback is helpful and encourages action on this. It's disappointing that this has been neglected. Reading this and related tickets, problems with the [Reply] tool only supporting colons have now been raised independently on several occasions across different Wikipedias; it would clearly be helpful to a lot of users to do something about this. I imagine a lot of editors are just quietly putting up with it, as I was for a long time.