Change 141617 had a related patch set uploaded by Jforrester:
Provide tools to make text bigger or smaller

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/141617

Change 141617 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jforrester):
Provide tools to make text bigger or smaller

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/141617

Change 141617 merged by jenkins-bot:
Provide tools to make text bigger or smaller

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/141617

We have headers and table captions providing semantically correct way how to emphasize headlining text. What is the use case of using big text elsewhere?

In T53613#2528664, @Danny_B wrote:

We have headers and table captions providing semantically correct way how to emphasize headlining text. What is the use case of using big text elsewhere?

Off-topic. VE and WT are designed to have feature-parity. If you think we should ban users from using these, file a task.

What does WT stand for?

What do you call feature-parity in this case?

"WT" is VisualEditor team's jargon for "wikitext". Wikitext editor's toolbar has buttons for this:

I'll note that there's a task to remove them: T40487. You could probably file a similar one for VisualEditor. But as long as one has them, the other should too.

In T53613#2529443, @matmarex wrote:

"WT" is VisualEditor team's jargon for "wikitext".

Correct (though we didn't invent it).

Wikitext editor's toolbar has buttons for this:

I'll note that there's a task to remove them: T40487. You could probably file a similar one for VisualEditor. But as long as one has them, the other should too.

Actually, VE will have one until it's banned in wikitext, not just "not easily accessible".

In T53613#2529443, @matmarex wrote:

"WT" is VisualEditor team's jargon for "wikitext". Wikitext editor's toolbar has buttons for this:

I'll note that there's a task to remove them: T40487. You could probably file a similar one for VisualEditor. But as long as one has them, the other should too.

Thanks for explanation.

So why instead of adding it to Visual Editor not removing it from WikiEditor then (which should be obviously easier)?

In T53613#2529467, @Jdforrester-WMF wrote:

Actually, VE will have one until it's banned in wikitext, not just "not easily accessible".

So ban it then. The request for it has been around for ages. Not even speaking that it has been deprecated ages ago even in XHTML we used before, and it is obsolete in HTML5.

In T53613#2529488, @Danny_B wrote:

In T53613#2529467, @Jdforrester-WMF wrote:

Actually, VE will have one until it's banned in wikitext, not just "not easily accessible".

So ban it then. The request for it has been around for ages.

At the bare minimum you'll need to run a three-month-long community RfC on meta with convincing arguments that explain as to why they all need to replace <big> with <span style="font-size: bigger;"> and so on. There are, from a quick search, over 70k pages with at least one of these on the English Wikipedia alone; the transition will be quite a lot of work.

It's not remotely worth it to spend that much in terms of WMF resources. If you want to try, you're welcome, but I seriously doubt you'll get sufficient consensus (and even then it'd probably need to be a configuration option so that third party wikis can address the breaking change in slower time).

Not of this is germane to this ticket, however.