This is kinda interesting, but I don't think it's within the goals of Wikipedia, or, more importantly, within the cultural model of Wikipedia. There is an assumed goal that Wikipedia wants more eyeballs/pageviews. If you ranked the importance of pageviews to most wikipedians it would be very low. It is a goal, in as much as we want people to benefit from wikipedia, but I think it would certainly fall below core principles like neutrality, free content, and the other [[WP:5P]]s. There are probably lots of other normal policies that people would rate higher than pageviews. Realizing that, the culture is not such that we want millions of random people saying they like pokemon, or pop-culture-icon of the week, or even discussing their health concerns. These are all valid things to do, but unless you are working on Wikipedia (which we encourage!) there is really no reason to lure people in. Our culture is very much more like co-workers with a shared goal, than is it a bunch of chums at the pub. (with a few exceptions of course :) This might be a great opportunity for another site though, maybe a browser plug-in. Want to talk about this topic? One click away at nabble, or something. In general though, I think centralized discussions about general topics are a dying breed of website. People are better served by specific fora (http://community.breastcancer.org/ for example) for subjects not everyone has an opinion on. For subjects that are in the general awareness, as more and more people come online, the likelihood of people you know in real life being online goes up, and people start to realize they care more about what their actual friends think than random people in Australia. Just some thoughts, I got carried away! :o Judson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion