Talk:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/(Un)delete associated talk page

We have published our first project update and the project goals!

@Ammarpad, Alexis Jazz, MER-C, and Dipsacus fullonum: Hey all, thanks for your comments on the #11 Wish of the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey! The Community Tech has started work on this wish and we wanted to make you aware of this. We'd love to hear your input. Thanks for being such proactive members of the wishlist. NRodriguez (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

NRodriguez (WMF), this is actually happening? The project page isn't clear, but I hope this includes API support. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 01:04, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz: Yes, API support is included. We're going to implement deletion first (doing UI and API at the same time), and then undeletion. --ELeoni (WMF) (talk) 11:43, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Open questions

• Limit of 5000 revisions: I'd rather not see the per-page threshold change. Currently, if a page and its talk page each have under 5000 revisions, you can delete them both. This update provides some UX sugar that allows that to happen with a single form submission; if you can still do it with two single-page deletions, it should still be possible w/ the new UX.
• Idea: if either page has over 5000 revisions, show an error noting which pages have too many revisions, and let a dev/steward handle it. [It is rare to delete the talk page but leave the page; sometimes one leaves the talk page about a now-deleted page.)

Warmly, –SJ talk  21:30, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

@Sj: What you're saying is mostly correct, but this update wouldn't just be UX sugar. The talk page deletion would happen in the same request of the non-talk deletion, and in the same database transaction. It's the total write time that would be checked to ensure the request wasn't slow (although I'm not entirely sure about what monitoring we have in place for the total transaction time). On top of that, if we already know that the talk page needs to be deleted, the backend code could also optimize that and do the whole thing in a single DB query (this is not currently the case, but might be implemented in the future). The same thing would apply here -- it's the total query time that would be checked against the time limit. That said, I'm unsure about the value of still having a revision limit, given that nowadays deletions are batched and shouldn't cause performance issues as they used to. Nonetheless, as long as the limit exists, we should make our best to ensure that it still serves its original purpose. --ELeoni (WMF) (talk) 11:35, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Got it! Yea, it was only a performance question early on. So long as it doesn't get harder for someone to separately delete the article and its talk page, I'd be glad to see any update along these lines. Thanks, –SJ talk  00:59, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

Default

I think a configuration setting ($wg variable) will need to be provided to adjust the default setting of the "also delete talk page" checkbox. On Wikipedia it would be on by default, but on Wiktionary it would be off by default (that community rarely deletes talk pages). Additionally, most wiki communities do not delete root user talk pages, so the checkbox would be off by default in for all non-subpages in the User namespace. This, that and the other (talk) 12:51, 5 February 2022 (UTC)