Title says it all. What is your preference, and why do you prefer it over the other?
Title says it all. What is your preference, and why do you prefer it over the other?
One of the problems with talk pages is page history. You could have five conversations going on at the same time only for all activity be recorded on a single history page. Less than ideal if you are concerned with the actions of a single lengthy conversation. Diffs and logs are conveniently in one location for each thread in the message wall. Much more useful.
Message walls give the option of displaying history two ways: per thread or per wall. I have 16 pages of message wall comments, yet only five when using the wall history (showing creating, removing, and restoring threads). New threads are bolded on the history page for very quick viewing (40 to 50 conversations on a page, similar to what you might have on a talk archive page, but with more information, especially combined with individual thread histories, at less clicking/head scratching than a talk page could provide - made worse for those users who fall to use descriptive edit summaries).
As message wall conversations can get length, so can those on talk pages. The quote feature makes up for the singular method of comment flow if users use it correctly (a quote of a quote of a quote is annoying any day). Overall there are more non-opinionated benefits to using message walls versus user talk pages.
Personally I'm against editing other's posts. We are not grammar instructors so we shouldn't act that way in general conversation. On articles, go for it.
DEmersonJMFM wrote: Personally I'm against editing other's posts. We are not grammar instructors so we shouldn't act that way in general conversation. On articles, go for it.
Yes but the point is that anonymous users may want to be able to fix typos in comments they publish.
I suggested before (a long time ago) having the ability to "suggest edits" to other people's posts, which they can then review and then choose to publish. The same might be helpful on protected pages too: Hit Suggest Edits, make changes, and when you save, instead of going live, the admins would get a notification and a chance to approve or reject the edit.
Iynque:
This is a really good idea.
We kind of had it implemented on GuildWiki a while back. We had a Main Page/Editcopy where anyone could edit. Part of the admin's job was to review edits to that and if they were good copy them over to the mainpage.
Wikipedia implements it with Pending changes and StackOverflow also implments it.
Both talk pages and message walls are good, for me. Walls are very useful when you always forget to sign with ~~~~ and shows your avatar, which is good. However, talk pages are a bit easier to edit, and also to archive (as C.Syde65 said).
RansomTime wrote some stuff
Not to get too far off-topic...
Yes there are perfectly usable work-arounds for the problem of allowing good contributions even while a page is protected, even though they have flaws as well. For mirrors: they are non-obvious to newbies; credit goes to the admin who publishes the change, not the user who wrote it; etc. For suggesting edits on talk pages: Again, credit goes to whoever hits publish; it can be tedious to describe where a simple typo occurs, rather than just correcting it; you have to know how talk pages work... (they seem unnecessarily complicated to me); etc.
But on Message Walls, there is no talk page to discuss edits, and it would be INSANE to publish an editable mirror. :D It would be great to have a "suggest edits" or "pending changes" feature, at least on these sorts of automatically-protected contributions that are only editable by that one user. ...if not on all protected pages (including things like Wikia.css so non-admins can easily contribute to the wiki in that way too, without having the power to utterly break things, intentionally or accidentally).