Complexity
During today's team discussion, we talked about the complexity inherent with making people aware when a comment they are responding to is changed in a way they would value knowing about.

It's important to consider the "Complexities" below in the context of the value we assume resolving them will offer to people.

Complexities
In order to make people aware when a comment they are responding to is changed in a way they would value knowing about, we would need to:

1. Define what changes people would value being notified about
2. Write and maintain a list/algorithm that enables the software to detect the changes we'll have defined in "1)"
3. Account for the fact that, right now, the software is comparing talk page versions using HTML whereas people are editing talk pages using wikitext. This means that in the [sometimes lossy] translation between wikitext and HTML false negatives and false positives could be triggered that could impact the usefulness of the feature. Read: The software could alert people about changes that are insignificant, potentially eroding peoples' trust in the alerts the tool is sending them. The software could also NOT alert people about changes they consider significant, again, potentially leading people to lose trust in the alerts the tool is sending them.

Meta

• Open questions: I've updated the task description with the ===Open questions @Esanders shared with me in the meeting we had on 8 March 2022
• Prioritization: the Editing Team is going to wait on prioritizing work on this ticket until we have a clearer sense for peoples' experience with T250295 and T300560.
  • E.g. "How noisy/valuable do people perceive the notifications they are seeing within the Reply Tool?" "On the spectrum of having too much awareness of changes to the discussion you are responding within and having too little awareness, where does the current experience sit?"
  • Knowing answers to questions like the above will help us to develop a better sense for peoples' tolerance for false positives/negatives and subsequently, the tradeoffs we are and are not willing to accept with the approach we eventually move forward with

make people aware then the comment they are directly responding to is edited.

People often reply to the last comment in a thread to generally comment on the topic, not only to reply to that specific comment. In such cases, people might reflect to any (and potentially multiple) comments, so changes to the technically-replied-to comment’s ancestors may be just as important. Since edits other than replies are usually rare in talk page topics anyway, I think alerts about any edits within the section would be more useful than annoying.