User blog:Lelouch Di Britannia/Wiki Features

I wanted to discuss about two wiki features today, whether we should enable them or disable them. The two wiki features that I'm referring to are the Message Wall Feature and the Article Comments Feature.

1. Message Walls

Whether message walls as implemented by Wikia are good or bad depends on whether you are approaching them from a front end or back end perspective. For the former, message walls are certainly easier and more convenient due to not requiring users to sign their posts, automatically notifying participants in threads of new messages, and generally being easier to figure out than talk pages.

For the latter, however, message walls have some technical quirks which can make them much more difficult, frustrating, and/or confusing to manage than talk pages:

For instance, every message posted in a message wall thread creates its own separate page (which follows a singularly bizarre naming scheme, no less), which complicates or outright breaks the coding of certain templates which are placed on such threads (example: the monstrous switch parser in the link is necessary due to the nature of Wikia comments, which work similarly to message walls). "Deleting" message wall posts doesn't fully hide them from view, while actually deleting posts isn't exactly intuitive and is irreversible without...weird...side effects. As one last thing to keep in mind: posts on message walls can only be edited by admins, rollbackers, and the author of the post in question. (There are also some minor concerns about edits breaking the functionality of a user's talk page/message wall being easier to fix on the former than the latter, but I don't expect that to happen here.)

With all that out of the way, I personally prefer talk pages due to liking how much easier it is to browse talk page archives than old message wall threads.

2. Article Comments

Pros: Article talk pages are usually always ignored. The only time messages ever get some form of notability is in the Recent Changes, then the discussion lay dormant forever, until someone else happens to stumble upon it by accident. Comments would make it easier to notice when a discussion is happening, and would make it easier for viewers who have noticed a problem with the article but don't know how to/want to change it. It may also make it easier to keep topical discussions on the pages it concerns. Article comments would make it easier to have a discussions about a page ON the page.

Cons: Most of the comments are usually about shippings, which such discussions can be taken to blogs or forums. Article comments are usually made by IP users rambling nonsensical stuff. It would look terrible, it would distract from the article, it would look very untidy, is very non-encyclopedic and in the end they would be longer than the articles themselves. While there is a positive or two, such as making it easier for people to point out problems, I consider this to be a not strong argument. Anyone who can't find a talk page will be too inept to actually leave a comment in the comment section.

I personally am against Article Comments. Please comment your views and whether you support a feature or oppose it with legit reasons. Thanks.