You can now test this in Community Test Wiki.
Well, this is not from me, but from Wikia Staff. Yes, Sarah Dopp has recently announced that a new feature, called "Message Wall" is soon going to replace talk pages, just like Oasis replaced Monaco (I came after this change, but read it in the innumerable blogs about this in Community Central). Wall sounds like Facebook, yes, and gives Wikia a more social-network like touch. Unlike the traditional talk pages which need to be edited to leave a message, these "message walls" act more like the article/blog comments. The biggest thing is, you can't even avoid this through Monobook as this is compulsary for all users either registered or unregistered in the whole of Wikia. Even though I love Wikia, and Avatar Wiki, I wholeheartedly disagree with, disapprove, and dislike like this new feature, but still prefer the older one. I agree that we do need a bit of a lean towards social-networking for building a strong and nice community like our's, but don't you think this a bit too much? Lancer1289, a user H-Man Havoc knows, has posted a long and true comment or rather an article, which can be read here. He has brought up several good points, including that Staff are continuously ignoring the negative feedbacks and always only doing stuff to their own decisions. I wrote this blog as this one of the major changes, user talks will not be the same after this. One more thing, they will be automatically archived, so no worries for 888 to archive those. *sigh*
Visuals:
An update on Message Wall
Jen Burton, another Staff, has posted another blog about this which can be found here.
Coming soon in Wiki Features
Yes, that's right, we will soon be able to use it in our wiki. Read this blog for more details.