Cut that comment bar out

To the wiki in general: NOT EVERY PAGE NEEDS A STUPID COMMENT BAR!

We tolerate comment bars on user pages. That's because they're used for communication. They make life slightly easier when you need to communicate with your fellow editors.

We tolerate comment bars on business pages because people like to do "reviews." Ideally, users would edit the main text of the page and add their opinions directly, but few feel comfortable with that.

Outside of those two cases, please cut the comments out and just edit the page directly.

— Some semi-irate wiki user who wishes people would edit the actual page instead of randomly throwing in their 60k ZWD (2008) in the comment bar.

• Somebody raised this as a coming issue — plus the fact that "comment edits" are second-class citizens on an entry and create long, hard to read entries — back around 2005ish. I gave on that fight up a couple years ago, with a trailing effort of comment integration. It's only gotten worse... how many entries are not worth reading, or are difficult to glean information from now?

• Somebody should develop a "mixed-media" wiki, with main pages in wiki format, but each page with a shadow bulletin-board-style forum for all the talking, chatting, and fighting that could eventually be turned into good content for the page proper.
  

• Who would turn it into good content?
  

• What is the sound of one hand clapping?
  

• Wow. How Zen. ;-) —RyanMikulovsky
  

• Actually, it always makes me think of the Simpsons. But shouldn't everything be viewed with such sarcasm?
  

• It is a very serious question. Offloading the comments to a "shadow site" just pushes them farther away. What new mechanism would integrate the information into the entry itself?
  

• I think the first step is to define a "comment" and a "discussion" as two different things, and then to ask if it's best for both to enter into a page via the comment feature.
  

• Comment, discussion and review. The former is best integrated, discussion goes stale and grows to become too unwieldy if unchecked (i.e., the talk page discussions that are periodically wiped and can still be referenced in the history of the entry work well, but the various "<subject> Debate" haven't really solved anything and are now so stale nobody new can really add to them). Reviews make sense, but are often "edit via comment", adding information that should be in the entry... that then gets lost in the reviews.
  

• Good point; there are "reviews" too. So each page should have (1) a comment macro for comments, (2) a discussion board for topical discussions, and (3) some type of form entry page for "reviews" with appropriate quantifiable rating scales as well as qualitative/subjective comments.
  

• Plus the talk page. And we should also have some kind of live chat forum. And a Twitter feed tied to that entry. Some kind of Skype shared audio discussion would be nice too. Perhaps a live updated mailing list attached to it as well... anything we can do to distract from those pesky wiki entries. Of course, we'll need to have a set of content regulators to manage things when there's a comment that goes into the qualitative/subjective section, or if there's a discussion that gets started in the comment macro, or a fact gets mentioned in the reviews. An editorial staff, perhaps? My point is, we don't integrate the comments we have right now, and we only half-heartedly archive them. Who is going to do all this extra work you propose?
  

• There have been great advancements in AI recently. (But I do see your point. I don't know about comments, but I think that a lot of the discussion/fighting that goes on through the comments section would be easier to integrate if it were better threaded so as to make it clearer as to what the discussion actually is. This should replace the "Talk" page, not be added in addition to it. Currently, any form of discussion is confusing in the comments section because it gets interspersed with "I like burgers HOT" and "the receptionist at this place is a witch", etc) And yes, Twitter and Skype could be cool too! ;) And sorry about the flu; you coincidentally got the flu when I got the itchy-wiki-fingers.
  

• Or, the "Talk" page could be retained, but only as a menu pointing to different threaded topics in the forum.
  

• I actually am somewhat surprised — I actually like the idea of replacing talk pages with a forum. I suppose it's because I really dislike Talk pages here and discussion pages on Wikipedia. They get long, disorganized discussions in ThreadMode that a wiki isn't organized to handle. At the same time, I don't see a bunch of people eager to code Sycamore here, so this will probably stay in the realm of fantasy.
  

• The comment bar makes it easier for the non-sophisticated user to participate. I think if you cut the comment bars out, you cut down participation. —CovertProfessor
  

• They also make sense on many types of entries. I don't think anybody is talking about getting rid of them entirely, merely using them when appropriate as opposed to having them on every single entry. To turn around your logic, however, they also generate a second class of editors who never figure out that they are "allowed" to edit the entry. "Who is in charge of content" and "can you edit that page?" are pretty common questions, even among people who have added via comments. And sometimes even in the comments — how many times have you seen a comment that the entry is wrong about something? That's not really a reason to remove them entirely, but their ease of use is not without ramification. Another potential path would be to have a cultural shift that non-review comments are aggressively edited: content free ones are removed, factual ones are incorporated, followed up with an explanation. Alas, like the original problem, this has pros and cons as well... some editors would likely be turned off that their contribution was altered or deleted, no matter how nice the explanation. I think the discussion would best be phrased as "where should the balance be", not looking for a hard rule or additional layer of overhead.
  

• Could the wiki software keep a count of how many times a user has edited pages via the "Edit" button and via a "Comment" field? If so, then it could provide a different interface depending on their history. "Zero edits? Ten comments? Are you sure you couldn't integrate your comment directly into the page rather than entering it as a comment?" "12,000+ edits? Significantly fewer comments? Good afternoon, JW!"
  

• (As a post script — note the wording of the original complaint. "Not every page needs..." I think this is a pretty good excuse to examine options to see if anybody has some better ideas. Of course, anything that is proposed has to be clearly good enough to actually motivate us editors to do it... there's no magical "somebody should" that can be invoked here. It's just us fishes.)
  

• I understood that no one was proposing eliminating them entirely. I meant that even in the non-user, non-restaurant (or non-business) pages, the comment bar lowers the bar (ha ha) for participation. But your point is well-taken that it makes people think that they aren't truly editors. If there was another way to make things easier for people who get freaked out by computer codes... or to emphasize that anyone can edit... I'd be happy with that. —CovertProfessor
  

• Philip is working on something. Check out GUI Editor. —wl
  

• Very cool! My suggestion, then, would be to keep the comment bars in until the GUI editor is implemented, and then phase them out from the non-business and non-user pages. —CovertProfessor

• An example of several issues at once, all social, reinforced by various subtle things that decay or obfuscate concepts of editor equality and community.

• For more information, see Wiki Community/Longview, Town Characters/Talk