Change 934002 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):

[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Add option to unify display of VE enable preference

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/934002

Change 934002 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Add option to unify display of VE enable preference

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/934002

Change 947015 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Move visual editor out of Beta Features (without changing prefs)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/947015

(not scheduled yet)

If you'd like to put this in Tech/News, then I think this wording would be appropriate:

* The preference item for disabling the visual editor, "{{int:visualeditor-preference-disable}}", will soon be in [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-editor]] at all wikis.  Previously, it was in a different section at some smaller wikis.

Scheduled for tomorrow: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#deploycal-item-20230822T1300

Added to Tech News for next week: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tech/News/2023/35&diff=prev&oldid=25498434 (with a slightly different wording than @Whatamidoing-WMF proposed – the preference actually says "enable" instead of "disable" now, and I removed mention of "smaller wikis" since this affects some large non-Wikipedia projects like Commons). Feel free to rephrase.

According to be0b140,

// Use the old preference keys to avoid having to migrate data for now.
// (One day we might write and run a maintenance script to update the
// entries in the database and make this unnecessary.)

I think this day should be sooner rather than later, for two main reasons:

• It makes the preferences code quite a bit more complicated. More complicated code provides more opportunities to break something. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Just_make_it_a_user_preference#Difficulties, points 1, 6 and 7 apply, but without the benefit of actually providing more options to users.
• It makes it harder to set global preferences. How to enable/disable VE on all projects (by setting visualeditor-enable = 1, visualeditor-betatempdisable = 0 or visualeditor-enable = 0, visualeditor-betatempdisable = 1) if there is no single project where both appear on Special:GlobalPreferences?

Change 947015 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Move visual editor out of Beta Features (without changing prefs)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/947015

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2023-08-22T13:03:51Z] <urbanecm@deploy1002> Started scap: Backport for [[gerrit:933998|Remove unneeded $wgDefaultUserOptions['visualeditor-enable'] settings (T340696)]], [[gerrit:947015|Move visual editor out of Beta Features (without changing prefs) (T335056)]], [[gerrit:949588|Clarify 2017 wikitext editor's Beta Feature status (T344158)]]

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2023-08-22T13:05:34Z] <urbanecm@deploy1002> urbanecm and matmarex: Backport for [[gerrit:933998|Remove unneeded $wgDefaultUserOptions['visualeditor-enable'] settings (T340696)]], [[gerrit:947015|Move visual editor out of Beta Features (without changing prefs) (T335056)]], [[gerrit:949588|Clarify 2017 wikitext editor's Beta Feature status (T344158)]] synced to the testservers mwdebug2002.codfw.wmnet, mwdebug1001.eqiad.wmnet, mwdebug2001.codf

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2023-08-22T13:19:35Z] <urbanecm@deploy1002> Finished scap: Backport for [[gerrit:933998|Remove unneeded $wgDefaultUserOptions['visualeditor-enable'] settings (T340696)]], [[gerrit:947015|Move visual editor out of Beta Features (without changing prefs) (T335056)]], [[gerrit:949588|Clarify 2017 wikitext editor's Beta Feature status (T344158)]] (duration: 15m 43s)

In T335056#9109020, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

According to be0b140,

// Use the old preference keys to avoid having to migrate data for now.
// (One day we might write and run a maintenance script to update the
// entries in the database and make this unnecessary.)

I think this day should be sooner rather than later, for two main reasons:

• It makes the preferences code quite a bit more complicated. More complicated code provides more opportunities to break something. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Just_make_it_a_user_preference#Difficulties, points 1, 6 and 7 apply, but without the benefit of actually providing more options to users.
• It makes it harder to set global preferences. How to enable/disable VE on all projects (by setting visualeditor-enable = 1, visualeditor-betatempdisable = 0 or visualeditor-enable = 0, visualeditor-betatempdisable = 1) if there is no single project where both appear on Special:GlobalPreferences?

I agree it's not great, but this is a larger task than it seems, because there's a bunch of extra complexity in the VE preferences (on top of this problem) due to the wacky ways it was rolled out and rolled back in the past. I'm also technically not on the Editing team any more, so I can't really take on this myself. But I copied your comment to T344762: Migrate the 'visualeditor-enable' and 'visualeditor-betatempdisable' preferences to a single one, and added some subtasks to describe what needs to be done. I don't know when or if it will happen, but at least you'll have a task to point to when something breaks because of this ;)

FWIW, what we have right now is basically the same as it was for the last… five or so years, only the labels and locations on the Special:Preferences page are different. It's more complexity than needed, but it's not new complexity, at least.

As for Special:GlobalPreferences: it's silly, but you can do it by setting the preference on different wikis, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-editing for the opt-out wikis and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-editing for the opt-in wikis, as GlobalPreferences only shows the preferences that are settable on the current wiki (related tasks: T221655, T199258). VisualEditor will only look at the preference which is settable on the current wiki, so they won't conflict (I fixed that some time ago in T271434).

Tested on enbeta and debeta

{F37638750}

@EAkinloose F37638750 is not visible, could you please attach it to the task? Thanks in advance!

In T335056#9132207, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

@EAkinloose F37638750 is not visible, could you please attach it to the task? Thanks in advance!