Last modified: 2012-01-22 23:35:34 UTC
By providing a comment section under every Wikipedia article, we can enable people interested in that topic to talk with each other, make friends and exchange external resources pertaining to that topic (e.g. books, products, jobs, external references, etc.). Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia; it is also a very valuable "topic navigation and positioning service" that navigates you to any conceivable topic in your mind, and once you're at that topic's Wikipedia article, the article's URL becomes a unique address that "positions" that topic. With this position, we can do many useful things (such as the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph), just like we can do many useful things with a geological information system (GIS) such as Google Earth.
There are many MediaWiki extensions that can add a comment section to every Wikipedia article. Just go to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_Matrix/AllExtensions and search for "comment" or "discussion".
uh oh, did you discuss this with project communities?
Domas: Yes, we're hotly discussing it on Wikimedia Foundation's mailing list: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-January/071552.html
From discussion, we found that this feature request could mean very much for scientific research. For example, imagine if there are two mathematicians in the world interested in the same, very deep math concept, but they don't know each other. How do we let them meet and collaborate with each other? With a comment section under that math concept's Wikipedia article. Take another example. Imagine there are two medical researchers pursuing the same, very novel but very rarely known approach to a major disease, but they don't know each other. How do we let them meet and collaborate with each other? With a comment section under that approach's Wikipedia article.
Your goal is noble, but one needs to deal with realities of the internet. Comment sections under articles will undoubtedly be flooded with inane, sometimes pointless comments, just like the rest of internet, on blogs, news articles, etc. They won't be turned into bastions of peer-to-peer communication by experts in the field that article relates to. They'll be turned into a hot mess of comments from everyone else. What's worse, is that any iteration of these things tends to be a nightmare for administrative management, and difficult to search effectively. If your goal is to set-up a way for peers in fields related to a particular article to communicate, I would suggest hooking into some other medium, like forums discussing the subject. Let those scientists talk and discuss some other way, say by linking to a relevant page under "See also". To implement comments under every Wikipedia article, and expect them to be used for anything more than inane, redundant banter and spam between people who don't understand the topic of the article well (or worse, on already controversial articles, opening the floodgates to vandals) is naive at best.
cphoenix: The idea of creating Wikipedia itself was naive too. Firstly, we can allow each user to show/hide the comment section. If you're not logged in with Wikipedia, the comment section will be hidden by default. Secondly, there can be comment moderation by the public - if enough people vote a comment as spam, the comment will automatically be deleted. Thirdly, this comment section idea can be an experiment. If it does more good than bad, we can keep it. Otherwise we can remove it. It's just as simple as enabling/disabling a MediaWiki extension.
BugZilla is for technical requests, not for political discussion. Since this request has not gained consensus of any kind (or even been discussed to an extend before creation), it does not reach the current requirements for being implemented, and thus I have closed it. This is a major change that requires vast community participation before being followed through. No system administrator will ever make this change until that consensus is reached.
