User blog comment:Ohmyn0/Let's Talk About Talk Pages/@comment-761251-20110601223945

Notification when I get a response. -- this works better than blogs (or, presumably, article comments) that have no notifications whatsoever.

'Following a talk page isn't useful and it doesn't provide the detail that I want, especially on a particularly active talk page. -- this gets worse with comment-style converstaions (such as this one). We have had good experiences with splitting very active talkpages into subtopics, with a page for each - this is not hard to do as you can simply copy & paste the relevant contributions, and leave a message on the original page.

'''Clarity of where to respond to a message. ''' -- most wikis have the welcome tool set up, and it makes sense to clarify this right there. I recommend keeping conversations on a single page, because it is more transparent, and others can joining in and help.

If you have an old and well-maintained wiki, sometimes links that peope have used in their talkpage comments go "stale" as pages are moved or deleted. To keep these link targets off the WantedPages list, someone has to correct these links. The "classic" talkpage system allows anyone to do this maintenance; I would anticipate that an "automatic signage" system would pretty much prevent this.