The mobile interface (en.m.wikipedia.org) provides a handy interface for Talk pages: a "Reply" box which automatically adds your reply and signature (~~~~) to the bottom of a section. However! It adds your edit without indentation, whereas the proper format on Wikipedia's Talk pages is to indent by one level more than the comment you're replying to. (A first level indent has a ":" at the beginning of each paragraph; a second level indent has "::", etc.)
You can see the Reply box here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Diff#Better_white-space_handling_needed
You can see the reply I (SSSheridan) made here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help_talk:Diff&oldid=1019754610#Better_white-space_handling_needed
And you can see my manual addition of the indentation, to correspond with proper Talk-page ettiquette/format: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help_talk:Diff&diff=next&oldid=1019754610
Now, this is tricky because indentation on Talk pages is basically done a reddit-style indication of comment nesting, but implemented manually. The minimum indentation of a reply should be 1, as a reply to the top-level comment. (It doesn't make sense for a "reply" itself to be top-level, un-indented.) In contrast, the most usual case, as in the one I linked above, would be to indent one level more than the latest paragraph.
As I see it, here are the options:
- "Reply to original suggestion": make the text submitted through the Reply box be automatically indented by one.
- "Reply to latest comment": make the text be indented by the previous comment's indentation, plus 1.
- Offer an interface to choose comment level.
Obviously the third suggestion is the more difficult and more useful one. I think the following interface would be very clean and user-friendly - properly implementing the intention behind adding the "Reply" box at all.
- Parse the thread into individual comments, using users' signatures to delineate between them.
- Display the thread just as now, but with a little "reply arrow" icon at the top-right of each comment.
- Upon tapping any "reply" icon, the "Reply" box repositions to just under the previous comment's signature. (This is the way it's done on reddit etc.) The reply would then post with the appropriate indentation (previous level +1).
The default behavior, with no "reply" icon tapped, would be just as now - with the Reply box at the bottom - but with a default indentation of either level-1 or level-[previous+1].