User blog comment:Dopp/Giving User Profiles Some Love/@comment-1091639-20110707111923/@comment-3388044-20110708191307

 Sovq : Regarding your third paragraph — “I agree with you on the drawbacks … encourage more users to report issues with the wiki.” — I think a lot of what you are saying is wiki specific and relates to the experience of the members editing the talkpages. Regarding the threading of topics, I’m not sure I made my point clear: Because a new thread has a heading, and all postings thereunder relate to that topic, they are neatly threaded, and listed in a table of contents. The great thing about talkpages is how easy it is to find stuff: tables of contents, indexed archives, archive search boxes (see here for an example), etc. Where are the headings on comments pages? Where is the table of contents? Index?

Just today I had to fix my SUL at enWP and could not remember the command to do it. But, I remembered having discussed it on someone’s talkpage several months back. So, using the wiki search engine, I found it in less than two minutes from way back last year. Imagine trying to find something in 17 pages of unindexed, untabled, unarchived comments, let alone across an entire namespace. Sheesh!

Further, in your list of things you would not have to do, I think the fact that you ever have to do them attests to the lack of experience of your correspondents. For instance, your having to fix indenting colons surprises me. It is a sign of inexperience on the part of the Wikian. Nothing wrong with being new and inexperienced; that’s why we have rich text editors, to make the task easier for new members unacquainted with wikitext. Thus, one would expect inexperienced members to not be using source mode, but rather to be using a rich text editor mode wherein one only has to press the indent button. I am surprised that members experienced enough to work in source mode do not understand colon indenting, thereby requiring you to fix it.

Talkpage editing inexperience is a lesser or greater issue depending on the wiki. I find it not to be so common on our wiki. We use talk pages extensively, never use forums, and do not have comments activated on the site. Although, I do like your idea of an interactive interface in WikiaLabs that permits sysops to select in which namespaces they do or do not want comments activated, should they choose to activate them at all.

Finally, and as I said before, what’s the good of receiving notifications that there are new comments on your userpage if you cannot figure out where they are? At least on a talkpage you can go to the revision history and work through the diffs if it is not readily apparent.

In any event, I think this comments-versus-talkpages discussion, while interesting and thought-provoking, is moot since I do not think that Wikia Staff are proposing doing away with userspace talkpages.

Thanks!

P.S. Thanks for the CSS code!