User blog comment:Arcaedia/Enabling Article Comments/@comment-3418306-20150901094910/@comment-26955746-20150902004042

Yeah true, but as you said, a forum discussion already has to have taken place about a topic to avail of that feature. Even for a wiki as big as Elder Scrolls, I've still noticed a fair few pages that have no discussions, so that doesn't leave much hope for us :/

Well its not really more traffic that I'm hoping for. With the release of MD there'll naturally be an increase in pageviews. I'm more concerned about editor retention. I'm not claiming I know how to keep people interested in staying on the wiki but this is one idea I came up with that I hope will help. One reason why I think it might help is because comments are more convenient to use, and will thus be used more frequently by anon users. This isn't about someone arriving on Wikia wanting to contribute and getting to know the website well enough to find out it has a forum etc. I'm aiming more towards the potential editors that we can gain who didn't even know they wanted to edit a wiki. I started exactly like that, where I was really worried about publishing my first edit (as an anonymous user) and almost never edited again. Comments can act as a transition for people like that into a full blown editor. As for if it's currently made a difference, it's difficult to gauge it measurably but I would say that there have been more people commenting than had previously used the talk pages over the same period. Admittedly there hasn't been a massive increase, but hopefully that will change once we get more traffic, which hasn't happened since comments were enabled.

I definitely appreciate your opinions but it's sort of difficult to incorporate them into a decision since the article comments have already been enabled. You may have noticed the comment below where I pointed out those in favour are in the majority and even with you included, that's still the case. However, I'd be willing to potentially disable comments in the future if it becomes apparent they're counterproductive to what I wanted to achieve and/or the forum is used as an effective substitute.