User blog comment:Arcaedia/Enabling Article Comments/@comment-4140166-20150504052306/@comment-26955746-20150504135205

Yeah obviously I realise it's been a while since Human Revolution was released, but I don't think the problem can be explained by that alone. There's obviously not going to be any discussion if there's no convenient way to actually have a discussion. And at the moment, there is no convenient way. Just look at the Mankind Divided blog post that I made; people were casually posting their opinions/questions in the comments section. I see no reason why the same couldn't happen if we had article comments enabled. As a comparison, the comments sections on the Dishonored Wiki (a game released in 2012) is still being used frequently to discuss the games lore etc. and Dishonored has only ever had one game. (some of these comment threads are quite lengthy too).

Deus Ex's fanbase has been established since 2000 and it's had a (admittedly not so well received) mobile game since Human Revolution. Also, the Deus Ex fanbase has continued to be active on other sites in the meantime such as Tumblr and Reddit - so it's not as if people entirely lost interest in the games since DXHR was released. Plus I'm not just referring to the amount of editors right now; I feel like there's always been an unusually small amount of people contributing to the wiki. Again comparing it to Dishonored's wiki, their regular editors have been around consistently since 2013 - I don't think we've had many people that have contributed regularly for that period of time on this wiki. The weird thing is, content wise, Dishonored Wiki is pretty close to "complete" - that's definitely not the case for this wiki so why is it that they're retaining editors and we're not? There's got to be more to it than the latest game being released too long ago. Compare the amount of editors that have made over 5 edits and over 100 edits on Deus Ex Wiki and Dishonored Wiki, as well as the actual amount of edits made. There's a noticeable difference that can't be fully explained by when the games were released. When Dishonored was realeased it had ~5000 edits during the first two months. Deus Ex Wiki saw >9000 edits the first two months after DXHR's release, but for some reason the amount of edits went down significantly after that compared to Dishonored. It's also interesting to compare the number of days since each wiki's top contributers have been active: Dishonored, Deus Ex. (Dishonored also has a higher number of editors with >1000 edits)

As I said in the blog post, it might not get people talking about the games at all, but that being said, we don't really know unless we try it. Even if people do use the comments section, I realise it doesn't guarantee that people will stay on the wiki, but without discussions between users there's no sense of community. From experience, it can be really off-putting to start contributing on a wiki that's basically dead. (I don't think this wiki is "dead" at the moment but it felt like it was when I first joined, and I'm concerned that it'll end up like that again in the future if we don't try to change anything). I personally think it'd be worthwhile testing it out to see how it goes.