We talked about this during estimation but determined that this is not ready to estimate because it needs some more conversation. The labels in the menu are easy enough to change but the underlying technical naming would require an extensive refactor. We recently completed a task T359983 that changed the classes to the following:

.skin-theme-clientpref-night
.skin-theme-clientpref-day
.skin-theme-clientpref-os

Given the naming of the "skin" system, it would be problematic to refer to these options as "light" and "dark".

Changing the UI labels but leaving the classes as-is is also not ideal. These classes are public APIs used on-wiki by template editors, so it would be best to keep the technical naming and the UI consistent.

We have had several notes of feedback from community members and a round of usability testing that have shown that "Dark" mode makes more sense than "Night" mode for readers.

I would like to read through this but am unable to find a link. Could we please update the ticket to back link to all the research? For example, was the usability testing done for an English speaking audience or for multiple languages?

Changing the UI labels but leaving the classes as-is is also not ideal. These classes are public APIs used on-wiki by template editors, so it would be best to keep the technical naming and the UI consistent.

One possible solution would be to call the theme itself night, but present it in the UI as "Dark" and allow different languages to translate as needed.

The following questions can help gather more context and understand the requirements for the task involving changes in the Appearance settings:

1. What are the technical challenges associated with changing the terminology from "Night" to "Dark" in the settings?
2. Why is this change important to users and how does it align with user expectations from other products?
3. Who will be responsible for implementing these changes, and who needs to be involved in the decision-making process?
4. Where in the codebase do these changes need to be applied, and are there any dependencies?
5. When is the proposed timeline for implementing these changes, considering the impact on users and potential need for re-translation?
6. How will the change from "Night" to "Dark" be communicated to the community, and what steps will be taken to ensure consistency across languages?

@JScherer-WMF To add more data on last week's conclusions/discussions on syntax.

We chatted about this in Slack and agreed that for now the cost benefit of making this change is not worth it so moving to backlog.

Is this only to update the message values?
Are we concerned about the confusion between key and value having different text in messages?
If we update the messages that move the confusion to the code as parts of the code will be calling in night mode and the message keys would be called dark, what is the ultimate take here?

I will add a patch just to update the message values for now. Let us discuss this more

Change #1023534 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mabualruz; author: Mabualruz):

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] feature(Minerva): Standardize terminology to 'Dark Mode'

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1023534

Change #1023535 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mabualruz; author: Mabualruz):

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] feature(Vector): Standardises terminology to 'Dark Mode'

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1023535

In T361157#9740847, @Mabualruz wrote:

Is this only to update the message values?
Are we concerned about the confusion between key and value having different text in messages?
If we update the messages that move the confusion to the code as parts of the code will be calling in night mode and the message keys would be called dark, what is the ultimate take here?

I will add a patch just to update the message values for now. Let us discuss this more

As discussed in our SHDT meeting we will only :

• Change the message values for the UI to the new terminology dark/light/automatic.
• Change the description and documentation to have them both present dark/night, light/day, and os/ automatic.
• Code and message keys will keep the old terminology in use.

Change #1023535 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] feature(Vector): Standardises terminology to 'Dark Mode'

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1023535

Change #1023534 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] feature(Minerva): Standardises terminology to 'Dark Mode'

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1023534

Uhh... Totally missed this ticket. Several weeks ago I asked about night mode or dark mode, and now we have a feature called night mode internally and dark mode for the user... So the dark mode became a night mode in ~october-november and now we have a mix with a small rollback of terminology.