User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Tips for attracting readers and editors/@comment-244709-20130523011043/@comment-4189499-20130527095442

I think having social platforms as well as platforms for working on the wiki's content can come as a great benefit to the wiki. First of all, it lets you get to know the people you're working with, which can be really nice. Secondly, it can be a good place to get people to start on your wiki. I personally was drawn into Wikia in the first place through a forum that just talked about the show in question, and, as my confidence grew, slowly became a more an more active part of the Wikia community. Without a place to chat on that one wiki, I wouldn't be here on Wikia right now, and I wouldn't have been able to enjoy so many wonderful experiences here.

If you're worried about messages flooding recent changes, encourage people to start conversations in the forums (which I see you have active) instead of in blog posts, as each forum thread will only appear once in recent changes (from personal experience). This allows people to chat in a central environment but still keeping things clear for people only interested in editing the site's content. Another benefit of this is that by putting conversations in the forums, you are mixing up conversations for fun with conversations about wiki running in the Forum Activity list, hopefully encouraging people originally there for chat to click on the wiki-running-related threads and being drawn in to the wiki more.

tl;dr version, yes, I think places for community chatting are important parts of a wiki, yet it is best to put these in forums than in individual blog posts to cut down on the amount of clutter in Recent Activity as well as to try and avoid repeating topics. And although I don't think community building areas are of highest priority on a wiki, it can be fun to just relax and converse about the things you all know and love.