Several core activities have an admin setting to disable the requirement for an activity description. These are Book, Folder, IMS content package, Lesson, Page, File resource and URL.

MDL-49006 has set the default setting for these requiremente to false which makes sense for most Moodle installations.

But there are still several activities (Assignment, Chat, Choice, Database, Feedback, Forum, Glossary, Survey, Wiki) which have the description field as a required field and which completely lack an admin setting to disable this requirement.

Additionally, two activities (Quiz, Workshop) have the description field as a not required field and also completely lack an admin setting to enable this field as a requirement.

We have always asked ourselves why Moodle is inconsistent with these requirements.

There may be installations / scenarios / activities where the requirement of a description must be set to true. But there are also installations / scenarios / activities where everything can be said in the activity title and teachers just fill the required description field with rubbish.

I therefore propose to add admin settings for these requirements to all core activities so that admins can decide what their users need.

Apart from adding these settings at all, you can of course keep the default for these new settings set to their current values.