Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-24006128-20200612173803/@comment-3218221-20200612234234

MisterWoodhouse wrote:

Cool enhancement we've got this time around: Article Comments and Talk Pages coexist! No more either one or the other. We'll leave it up to your communities to decide how to use this additional functionality.

Interesting. I'm hardly the first to observe that users often don't use article comments for the ostensible purpose of discussing the article itself--that is, users tend to 'comment' their opinions on the article subject rather than discuss accuracy and quality, et cetera.

While this tendency does irk me, I admit I've not especially enforced the 'true purpose' of article comments on the wikis I administrate that have article comments enabled--why? Well, they're very small wikis with little in the way of editor activity besides my own. Users commenting = wiki engagement, however minimal; they signaled the existence of fans using the wiki more obviously (to casual visitors) than statistics.

Not that those comments have led to those users actually contributing to the wikis, most of the time. Alas. I've been thinking of having the newer (all pre-UCP) Wikis I admin go back to wiki-style forums, user Talk Pages, and article Talk Pages, but with this... Well. My first thought was the rather obvious option to enforce Talk Pages for article quality discussions and resign article comments to more casual use, but in practice I suspect user behavior will not change without stringent sysop oversight.

Is it jumping the gun to ask whether you might consider reversing the decision from a few years back to 'hide' the Talk Page button under the Edit button's drop-down menu? (New users: for context, the Talk Page button used to be adjacent to Edit)--that is, in light of comments and Talk Pages' future coexistence? It seems to me that keeping the Talk Page out of sight while the 'Article Comments' feature will remain immediately visible to users--well, it just won't work in the Talk Page's favor.

I'll concede that editors are likely going to be aware of the Talk Page regardless of where the link is, and that the Talk Page visibility has little effect on casual users who have no interest in editing, but still--the visibility imbalance is something to consider. I think I've seen some wikis use placeholder text in article comment text boxes to explain what comments are ostensibly for (i.e. meta-discussion of article), so perhaps placeholder text could be used to direct users to Talk Pages, but in practice I'm inclined to think most users ignore placeholder text.

Maybe that's where strict comment moderation would have to come in. I'll be interested to see what other admins decide to do. I'm betting wikis that already have article comments disabled will likely prefer to keep it that way; for instance, I doubt I'll enable comments on the oldest wiki I admin. Though, who knows? (Article Comments will still have the option to be disabled, yes? That was the impression I had from the Vision, Purpose, and Process blog post). The question is whether admins of wikis with active article comment sections will--or, will be able to--shift appropriate user activity toward Talk Pages...