[Foundation-l] Adding a comment section under every Wikipedia article

[Yao Ziyuan]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:13 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at 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]].

> On Jan 22, 2012 9:43 PM, "Yao Ziyuan" <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello All,
>>
>> I just filed a feature request which I think is of strategic interest
>> to Wikipedia:
>>
>> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33889
>>
>> Bug 33889 - Request to add a comment section under every Wikipedia article
>>
>> By providing a comment section under every Wikipedia article, we can enable
>> people interested in that topic to talk with each other, make friends and
>> exchange external resources pertaining to that topic (e.g. books, products,
>> jobs, external references, etc.).
>>
>> Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia; it is also a very valuable "topic
>> navigation and positioning service" that navigates you to any conceivable
>> topic
>> in your mind, and once you're at that topic's Wikipedia article, the
>> article's
>> URL becomes a unique address that "positions" that topic. With this
>> position,
>> we can do many useful things (such as the ones mentioned in the previous
>> paragraph), just like we can do many useful things with a geographic
>> information system (GIS) such as Google Earth.
>>
>> There are many MediaWiki extensions that can add a comment section to every
>> Wikipedia article. Just go to
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_Matrix/AllExtensions and search
>> for
>> "comment" or "discussion".
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Ziyuan Yao
>>
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