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

[Yao Ziyuan]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:31 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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]].

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).

>
>> 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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