Hello, this community vote is about whether the article comments on the wiki should be disabled.
Why?
• Comments are hard to moderate. A lot of the time spent administrating this wiki was spent cleaning comments that add nothing of value to the comment section, and the time that would need to be spent to clean all such comments makes such action not worth the effort. Users come to the wiki for the content, and the administration's focus should therefore be on the content.
• There are better alternatives. If somebody needs to discuss the article's topic, they can go to Discussions (the very same one you're seeing) and join an ongoing discussion about the topic, or start a new one if there isn't an ongoing one. Discussions now supports article tags and it's safe to assume Discussions posts tagged with a specific article will appear at the bottom of these articles (similar to how Forum posts already are) in the future. If somebody needs to discuss the article's contents, they can use the article's talkpage, or Discussions, or the wiki's Discord server. In fact, there have been very few meaningful discussions about article contents in the comments.
• Comments are switching to Discussions. With Fandom's efforts on upgrading their MediaWiki version they have decided to rewrite several of their extensions, article comments included. Article comments are going to be migrated to a Discussions-like platform, and while they would probably still appear at the bottom of articles, it's essentially going to be the same platform as the one you're using right now. Moving important discussions to one place now would save us the trouble of having to moderate two places later.
Why not?
Everything is a trade-off, this migration included. However, the pros of this move outweigh the following cons:
• Contents will not be preserved. Once deleted, you will not be able to see the contents of previous comments. However, I will create a dump of all article comments made on the wiki before their disabling so you will be able to search through them. If the format of the dump turns out to be too complicated for you to search through, I will be available for providing you with comments that match any criteria in any format (while the request is within reason, at least).
• Anonymous users will not be able to contribute to discussions, at least until Fandom allows anonymous users to contribute in Discussions. Given that you're probably not an anonymous user while reading this, and that we didn't have that many meaningful comments from anonymous users, I don't believe this will be a huge problem.
Voting guide
• Please clearly express your support or opposition of the idea outlined in this thread.
• You must provide a valid reason for your support or opposition of the idea, otherwise your vote won't count as valid.
• Posts that do not add anything valuable to the discussion will be deleted.
This vote closes on 13th April around 12:00 UTC.