This bug is about the generalisation of the solution deployed in bug #50929 in the Wikimedia environment. Having in mind the medium term of the deployment of the VisualEditor in many/most of the MediaWiki wikis, it could be a good idea to give the sysadmins the choice of enabling or disabling the VisualEditor by default for registrated users, with a LocalSettings parameter wgVisualEditorDefault.

This would give the choice to the sysadmins to enable by default or not the VE for registrated users (for anons there is already the preference wgVisualEditorDisableForAnons), and this could be directly used in the Wikimedia environment to replace the parameter $wmgVisualEditorDefault.

To resolve this bug, the patch https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/75541/ could be generalised by renaming the new preference "visualeditor-betatempdisable" into "visualeditor-preference-disable", and depending of the variable wgVisualEditorDefault either the positive preference (for alpha/beta environments, "Enable the VE") or the negative preference (for production environments, "Disable the VE") would be used, the other preference being hidden with wgHiddenPrefs.

In the normal scenario the wiki change from beta to production environment, it would be easy for the sysadmin to change the wgVisualEditorDefault value from false to true and this would automatically activate the VE during the change, so that the users are aware of the new setting and have the possibility of seeing the new editor (some welcoming message could be displayed then) and if users don’t like it they are given the possibility to disable it (or not if the relevant preference is hidden, but this is a sysadmin/community choice).

I point out the default messages visualeditor-preference-enable/disable should have a general-wiki phrasing, and any Wikimedia customisation (about namespaces where it is enabled, about the time the parameter is available before possibly hide the preference) should be customised in the WikimediaMessages extension (see my comment https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50929#c34 ).

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50929