User Dhsert has left NWE feedback at
Judging from the URL, they wanted to modify the edit summary for a new discussion on a talk page, and found the edit summary box is visible but greyed-out in the section=new workflow.
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/New topic/Flow
[I have also transcribed their feedback to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback#Can't modify edit summary for new section in NWE.]
Your answer there is correct: For all its merits and demerits, that's normal for all the MediaWiki editing environments.
Normal now, but with this project is there an opportunity to change things to allow modifying the summary for new sections?
What would you like it to look like, in terms of what's shown in the history page?
The current "/* section name */ new section" is fine. If I wanted to add more explanation, I’d append it after "new section". But that’s just me.
Would there be be value in tagging new-section edits? We can filter History on tags but there’s no straightforward ability to search/filter by keywords in the edit summaries that I know of. Say you wanted to list a history of all topics/discussions on a talkpage, including archived ones that are no longer in the TOC.
I'd love to see two boxes for edit summaries: one for the auto-generated component, and another for the user-entered part. They could be selectively disabled if we wanted to prevent users from deleting specific info in certain cases (though I can’t think of one).
Does the pre-populated /* section */ text confuse people or discourage them from adding to the summary? Instead of suppressing that completely as we currently do on mobile, a two-box system would
a) allow us to modify the pre-filled text if we know what we’re doing, and
b) still present an inviting empty box to type into (or with placeholder text like “describe what changes you made”)
In general, more boxes = more complexity = more confusion.
I wonder what other experienced editors would think of this.