D_C <d3ntaku(a)gmail.com> wrote: While I can't think of a way of creating anything as direct as a wide-open textarea, there are a few features you could exploit to make things more inviting / obvious. The discussion tab appears on every single article, right out of the box. There's no way of *removing* it without carefully hacking up the source code! All it does is link to a separate wiki page for holding discussions on - it evolved out of the desire of Wikipedians to keep the articles looking like articles, and have discussion associated with but visually separate from each one. (More traditional wikis consider discussion to be simply content that hasn't been fully refactored yet, and treat the whole site as more of a collective brainstorm than a collaborative development project.) Note that if the discussion page has not been created yet, the link will appear red, and go straight to an edit box to create it. If it does exist, the link will take you to the existing discussion, which you will then have to edit. There's certainly nothing to stop you adding a "==Discussion==" header at the bottom of every article - although as yet there is no way of creating this automatically on new pages. The section could then be editted individually (via the little link marked "[edit]") - I think this usually only shows up for logged-in users, but that may be alterable in the settings. As well as editting existing sections on their own, there is a link on discussion pages for adding a *new* section (somewhat hidden as a little tab marked "+" in the default monobook skin). And by exploiting the URL scheme for that, and a few magic variables (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Variable) you can add it to *any* page, with something like: * [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit&section=new}} Add a new section to this page.] Don't worry, you don't have to type all that every time, you can use a template (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Template). For instance, put the above in the page [[Template:newsectionlink]] and you can add it to any page just by typing "{{newsectionlink}}"! I know this doesn't really answer your question, but I'm just giving some examples of how existing features can be exploited to get something approaching what you're after. This seems to be an increasingly common request, and there is no specific feature for this in the current software. As well as the "orphan" problem you identify, making it too easy to create a new page runs the risk of duplicate articles being created with similar names, because people failed to search adequately; of course, this could also be blamed on the software's search facility, and there have been some promising experiments in this area recently. One thing that comes close is to edit the interface message which appears when you type a non-existent page into the search box and click "Go" by editting [[MediaWiki:nogomatch]]. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Nogomatch for an example of this. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]