User blog comment:Jenburton/An Update on Message Wall/@comment-91.48.244.194-20111001102539

In the comment section of the first blog entry about this suggested change, someone stated that this way of communicating is better, because it is used on many other sites and people "know how to use it".

There's a saying that goes something like this: "If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will tend to look like a nail."

Applied to the change suggested here, this means: if you're taking away one communication tool and hand out another, future communications will look like communications done with that new tool everywhere else. The question is, do we really want that?

On Facebook, I see stuff on people's walls that isn't even worth being communicated. It's done anyway, because it's "easy".

On a Wiki that has article comments enabled, I see that feature being misused for all kinds of off-topic chat. Also, because of the specific implementation, I often see discussions being split in several parts because users (mis?)understand message walls as some sort of assembly line where new entries have to be posted at the top - especially when "old" discussions drop off too soon. The fact that Facebook, the probably best-known implementation of a message wall, is going towards some sort of "timeline" analogy, will most likely just worsen that issue.

Generally, message walls aren't "less confusing" than talkpages, they are just confusing in a different way - less for shallow, "chatty" conversations, but more in case of longer discussions that involve several different people. I believe the latter is much more important for a Wiki than the former...