Looking at the video it was not clear what was the issue here. After taping the option to edit the page, the wikitext of the page is shown in the editor as expected. What is the "Backend reference" that was expected not to be shown? After publishing the section is shown as collapsed (that is a separate issue: T316642) which does not clearly show the published contents (maybe that's generating my confusion)

if that "wikitext" is expected then I can go ahead and close this. I originally thought a user was not meant to see that on the UI.

see image:

In T316492#8198701, @EChukwukere-WMF wrote:

if that "wikitext" is expected then I can go ahead and close this. I originally thought a user was not meant to see that on the UI.

Ok. I see. Thanks for the clarification, Emeka.

Contents, in general, can be edited in two modes: wikitext or visual mode. The editor tool keeps the last mode used by the user (or uses a specific default defined per wiki if it is the first time). This is the usual behaviour for any page the user edits.

For the specific case of pages created with Section Translaiton, the behaviour of the editor should be the same. That is, the page should open with the same mode the user has previously used.

In order to check whether this is the current behaviour you can verify that if you switch to visual mode an make an edit to a page initially, you can publish a translation later and the editing option shown in this task will lead to visual mode.

@Pginer-WMF thanks for this explanation. I will look into that separately. Also I will go ahead and close this, thanks

Not sure I have the permission to close tasks so I moved this to done