User blog:Cid Highwind/Message wall fallacies

Since many "reasons" for changing talk pages to message wall are simply replied ad infinitum by staff, and the article comment implementation actually makes it harder to follow conversations (funny, isn't it?), I'm listing some of the fallacies here:


 * Talk pages are hard - you have to click edit and then use wikitext: Considering that this is a wiki, do we even want people that can't be bothered to properly use this core functionality to join conversations? - these people most likely won't be contributors, anyway. Also, keep in mind that there isn't much wikitext to learn for a simple request on a talk page, and there's something like a RTE to help with that.


 * Talk pages are hard - you have to make sure to sign your posts: Actually, being used to wiki communication for years now, I sign posts unconsciously. For users that keep forgetting that, there would have been a much simpler solution than a whole talk page redesign. For example, any edit of a *_Talk: namespace page could be parsed for a signature wikicode - and if such isn't found, it could either be added automatically, or the user warned.


 * Talk pages are hard - you have to get the indentation right: This is not difficult for users who are used to the indentation scheme of a community, and it can be fixed by others while writing a reply in all other cases. New users are more likely to start a discussion than to enter a discussion that already has a good amount of indented content, making this even less of a problem. On top of that - message wall's solution to this problem is to simply take away indentation, making conversations less structured, instead of offering some auto-indentation feature. If a community wants unstructured conversation, they could just get rid of any indentation schemes and instantly have "easier talk pages".


 * This can't be made optional, we want consistency: Consistency with what? Feature consistency across all Wikia - in which case, why are other features optional, like "article comments", or "badges", or "blogs", ...? Or do you plan to remove these inconsistencies in the future and force all communities to make use of all features? Or is it "consistency of the conversation experience" on each single wiki - in which case, what about the Talk: pages of all other namespaces except User:? Do you plan to change these to message walls, too?

...more to follow