User blog comment:Poseidon133/Why do some wikis have talk pages?/@comment-303594-20150415125438

Here's why I prefer talk pages:
 * They tend to discuss the article rather than the content - what I mean by this is that the comments on a page about Darth Vader might have someone talk about what a good villain he is, something like that. Talk pages tend to be more about how to improve the article. The purpose of talk pages is to get editors talking about the contents of the page. Wikia's aim with comments is to get user interaction about the content of the page. This leads to less quality content in my opinion, but higher user engagement.
 * They're easier to administer. Vandalism can be reverted by users. Diffs are diffs that you can view immediately instead of waiting for lazy loading.
 * You can reply to a specific post - the indentation level system means that you can reply to any reply, without resorting to having to mention which post your're replying to.
 * They're more lightweight. No-one has any issues moving a page with a talk page (or even a few talk archives). Moving a large article comments page means the system has to move every subpage.
 * They're linked by topic, there's no way to go "oh, see "issues with lightsaber section", you have to link the top-level comment yourself.

Forums/wall solve some of these issues, they're not linked to pages so don't need the overhead to be moved around, they still attract a bit more low-quality posts, but no-where near most wikis comments that I've seen.