That's the purpose of talk pages. If you were to talk to people wanting to chat about article Foo, you wouldn't find anyone. If you want to put everybody reading the article on Foo chat, it'd be unmanageable (and people won't like that). Although some more synchornization with the irc channels could be good, I don't see future for your proposal.

Resolving this as WONTFIX.

All editable pages have talk pages where issues / concerns / etc. can be discussed. To create a chat room-type system for each page would be unimaginable.

There are a variety of outlets for discussion of Wikipedia and its content, including IRC (the #wikipedia channel on irc.freenode.net is a good start). But to have a system of what could be thousands or millions of individual chat rooms is simply never going to happen.

Followers of this bug will be interested in http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals/Real-time_chat

usermono wrote:

Actually, if the channels were organized by topic, then we wouldn't have 3 million, but perhaps 40. If there was interest, the channel number could grow and cover more specific topics. I'd start with channels (or chatrooms or whatever you want to call them) for:

Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Natural sciences · People · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology

Any thoughts?

There's already IRC. There's even an extension that allows to use it from on-wiki interface. Therefore, adding yet another method of chat would result in multiplying entities beyond necessity. Don't forget that all means of communication in
MediaWiki is there to achieve one goal: collaboration, not random chit-chat. And real-time chatting is much less convenient for that exact purpose.

Not a snowball's chance in hell that we'll ever implement it.

usermono wrote:

This really isn't that difficult. Could you link to that extension?

*In my opinion, this is a simple matter of connecting to IRC and adding a tab.
*Wikinews added an opinions tab; this can't be that difficult.
*This really is a community decision, not a developer decision.
*Who told you it was "random chit-chat" was the only use?

(In reply to comment #5)

There's already IRC. There's even an extension that allows to use it from
on-wiki interface. Therefore, adding yet another method of chat would result in
multiplying entities beyond necessity. Don't forget that all means of
communication in
MediaWiki is there to achieve one goal: collaboration, not random chit-chat.
And real-time chatting is much less convenient for that exact purpose.

Not a snowball's chance in hell that we'll ever implement it.

*This really is a community decision, not a developer decision.

That is totally different. The opinion tab is just a talk page.

*In my opinion, this is a simple matter of connecting to IRC and adding a tab.

Its a tad more complicated than that, but that is more or less what you do. However I do not believe difficulty is the issue, more there is philosophical issues.

Could you link to that extension?

There are many (although a lot of them suck). You know there is a search button -
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Chat_extensions

*This really is a community decision, not a developer decision.

Thats debatable, however i don't see any links to community consensus either.

(In reply to comment #6)

This really isn't that difficult. Could you link to that extension?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebChat

*In my opinion, this is a simple matter of connecting to IRC and adding a tab.
*Wikinews added an opinions tab; this can't be that difficult.

Adding a tab is easy. We're not objecting because it's hard to do.

*This really is a community decision, not a developer decision.

Fair enough, but without a pretty strong community consensus for this you'll be hard pressed to find a developer to implement it. Even then, it might not get implemented anytime soon (unless it is something the Foundation wants and can put paid developers behind).

usermono wrote:

The WebChat extension is useless, if you want to use Freenode (all the WM channels are there) as Freenode blocks Mibbit.

This is a "featured proposal" at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Real-time_chat the Strategy Wiki; we'll have to see where that goes.

(In reply to comment #8)

(In reply to comment #6)

This really isn't that difficult. Could you link to that extension?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebChat

*In my opinion, this is a simple matter of connecting to IRC and adding a tab.
*Wikinews added an opinions tab; this can't be that difficult.

Adding a tab is easy. We're not objecting because it's hard to do.

*This really is a community decision, not a developer decision.

Fair enough, but without a pretty strong community consensus for this you'll be
hard pressed to find a developer to implement it. Even then, it might not get
implemented anytime soon (unless it is something the Foundation wants and can
put paid developers behind).

usermono wrote:

The WebChat extension is useless, if you want to use Freenode (all the WM channels are there) as Freenode blocks Mibbit.

This is a "featured proposal" at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Real-time_chat the Strategy Wiki; we'll have to see where that goes.

(In reply to comment #8)

(In reply to comment #6)

This really isn't that difficult. Could you link to that extension?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebChat

*In my opinion, this is a simple matter of connecting to IRC and adding a tab.
*Wikinews added an opinions tab; this can't be that difficult.

Adding a tab is easy. We're not objecting because it's hard to do.

*This really is a community decision, not a developer decision.

Fair enough, but without a pretty strong community consensus for this you'll be
hard pressed to find a developer to implement it. Even then, it might not get
implemented anytime soon (unless it is something the Foundation wants and can
put paid developers behind).

*** Bug 29642 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

• Bug 57507 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***