Proposal:Comment function

Status (see valid statuses)

---

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!

1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

Share this:

Summary

The talk page should be made more interactive with readers than it is now. Many anonymous or new users are unfamiliar with the talk page custom that exists in Wikipedia, and once they hit the Wikipedia article and discovered that the information they were looking for was not there, they would just leave without a word. Perhaps a comment text box at the bottom of each page for readers to suggest possible improvements or tweaks that may be needed, or a place for readers to say "this page is very helpful to me" to add a bit of comfort to the editors (:)) may be helpful in this case. New comments appear in the watchlist in the same way as all other edits to the article. For instance for physics articles the comment might be as simple as request for a more detailed explanation or better wording to make it more understandable by new students. This may be hard to see from an editor's point of view, but with this little bit of additional explanation, Wikipedia will be more helpful to the people in need.

This function is particularly helpful in smaller Wikipedias as there are less editors and the content is not as well-written as the English Wikipedia. Hence these Wikipedias appear to be less competitive than other informative sites (esp. the Chinese Wikipedia as its competitors de facto allow plagiarism from other sites (Wikipedia included) and employ this as a powerful means to expand their content).

Key Questions

The comment function may be abused in the same way as the article and the talk page by spam, propaganda, junk comments, vandalism etc. Maybe it can be avoided by making the comment function collapsible; disabling the comment function of highly sensitive or controversial pages; using a tag filter to transfer all potentially "spammy" or unconstructive comments to the talk page; or impose a compulsory review by trusted users (flagging) before the comments are made public.

Potential Costs

Should be very low.

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Comment function.

Want to work on this proposal?

1. .. Sign your name here!