User blog:Arcaedia/Enabling Article Comments

One thing that seems to be the case with this wiki is that not much discussion goes on here. The talk pages are sometimes used when someone has something specific to say/ask, but there's no general discussion about the games. I find it unusual that a wiki for such a well-known series has very few long-term editors, and I suspect part of the problem is this lack of discussion. This may be a problem that won't be possible to solve, but I was trying to think of ways that we could improve it.

I was considering the idea of enabling the Article Comments feature that replaces talk pages with a comments section at the bottom of articles. To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the comments section and there are definitely some drawbacks, but it might encourage more people to stay on the wiki if they see people having discussions in the comments. Here are the pro's and con's that I could think of regarding enabling this feature:

Pro's

 * Is an easy way for users (including anonymous users) to interact with people on the wiki - they don't have to have a specific question, the comments can be used to say anything about a topic.
 * It feels a bit less "formal" than Talk pages and as a result, will probably be used more often - Talk pages are normally reserved for questions about the content of an article etc. I don't think people are comfortable with using it to have an informal discussion or analysis of a topic (I've seen both of these occur on other wiki's with the comments section enabled).
 * Comments will be seen more often than Talk pages - People really only visit talk pages when they have to, but simply scrolling to the bottom of an article will allow people to view the comments on it.
 * There's no need to add the ~ at the end of your comment.

Con's

 * If there are a lot of comments on an article, they take up a good bit of room at the bottom of the page (which looks kind of bad in my opinion).
 * It's more likely that people will post junk/irrelevant comments/offensive content in the comments compared to the Talk pages.
 * This will mean that comments will have to be patrolled by admins.
 * Comments added to an article appear in the Recent Activity which tends to clog it up a bit.

All of these really only apply if people actually use the comment feature, but it seems to be possible to turn it on and off with relative ease so it might be worthwhile at least testing it out. So, what do you think about this idea? Should it be enabled temporarily, permanently, or not at all?