Wikimedia Phabricator tasks have a "Priority" dropdown field (which is not consistently used) with several discrete values, among them "Lowest". See [1] for the full list of Priority field values. Since [2], "Low" and "Lowest" priority share the same definition.

I propose to disable setting the "Lowest" Priority value in Phab tasks.

"Lowest priority" can sound demotivating / disrespectful ("there is nothing that could be even less important"). However, bikeshedding about changing the name of the value would ignore further observations:

* About half of the people who are most active in setting initial Priority values do not ever set Priority to "Lowest"[3]. * There is no significant difference between median age of open tasks with Low and with Lowest priority[4], thus nothing seems to get realistically differentiated here. * Personally I also assume Lowest priority is sometimes used instead of honestly declining a task (means: "this is not a good idea"[5]). But of course that is rather hard to prove.

If you have opinions and/or ideas how to interpret data differently, please add them to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T228759 to keep them in a single place - either as a text comment, or via "Award Token" to express support or disagreement without adding words.

Thanks, andre

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Priority_level... [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T317533 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T228759#6988320 [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/t... [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Bug_report_life_cycle