On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:31 AM, Yao Ziyuan
<yaoziyuan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:13 AM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There is already a discussion page attached to
every article. It's for
discussing the article, though, rather than its topic.
Besides this, another disadvantage of the current "Talk" tab is it
uses the wiki way to talk, not the typical "comment section" we see
under every YouTube video, Flickr image, Facebook status update, etc.
The wiki way to talk may be favored by the Wikipedia community, but is
really weird to the general public.
While we are more than a conventional encyclopedia, we are still an
encyclopaedia and I don't think we should add job and product adverts to
our articles.
If people want to make friends, they can go to Facebook. If people want to
find or contribute encyclopedic information (and, perhaps, make some
friends along the way as an added bonus) then they should come to us.
The unique merit of using Wikipedia as a discussion place is its
uniqueness. There are many "cat forums" on the Web, but they're
scattered all over the Web; in contrast, the Wikipedia article [[Cat]]
is a unique and prominent place for the topic "cat". If people want to
go to a centralized, unified place to talk about cats, they should
come to [[Cat]].
This merit is even more evident when the topic is very specialized,
e.g. [[Phonological history of English low back vowels]]. I bet there
isn't a forum on the Web dedicated to this very specialized topic, and
even if there is one, it can be very hard to find it with Google
(because it may use a slightly different term to describe this topic).
However, if every Wikipedia article has a corresponding comment
section (actually a forum), people with this special interest
("phonological history of English low back vowels") will know where to
go to find each other, forming a "special interest group" (SIG).