Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24376429-20140412002355/@comment-24463401-20140413020059

ImGonnaBeThatGuy wrote: The Bitter Cold wrote:

The list goes on and on. The point is that restricting people from using the chat for a specified period of time puts a serious bar on communication between wiki members, and is an unnecessary sacrifice when there are other options available. Why is communication between wiki members necessary? What does it provide that can be done through talk pages or, if you really want to talk to your friends, a hundred other methods available elsewhere on the internet?

Chat is, generally, something used by MAYBE 75 different users a day? Even that number seems high, but for the sake of argument let's bump it up even more. Let's say it's 100 people a day. Let's also keep in mind, that it's usually the same 100 people every day.

On average, we have 300,000 visits a day (this is just going off the past 7 days).

So, most people don't give any kind of shit about chat. They don't use it for communication of any kind, they don't have friends in there, they don't view it as some kind of super tight-knit community, it's not the only reason they come here. It doesn't matter to them.

If the vast, vast, vast majority of visitors to this site don't care about chat why do we need it? The site won't be destroyed because we lose 100 people. Active users haven't had any problems communicating in the last two weeks, so it won't cause some sort of breakdown.

But the crazy thing is that the smallest part of our site causes so much bullshit. And Bitter, I know you're saying, "Then just solve the problems." But why? Chat users are such a small fraction of the site that the simplest solution is just getting rid of it. The whole "Why keep it if only a few people use it?" argument can also apply to 80% of the site. All the articles written that only like three people read, all the forum posts that get closed as soon as their posted, and basically all of the blogs. I understand that chat causes BS, but considering that a lot of people in general just spout bullshit... I think that we may just have a large collection of them. People can spread bullshit in forums (this one for example), article comments, and talk pages. If there's anything that I've learned in my life, it's that people just keep on talking even when they know they're saying bullshit.