[rlamego]

Originally Posted by the nail geek

Is there another way that you feel would be better?

I don't think there is any problem in letting readers know that there are comments made to the article.
But I don't think they should be full displayed in every page, because they may relate to something written a couple of pages ahead or to nothing at all, thus breaking the reader's concentration and giving away the rest of your article.

People should start by commenting the article and then discuss the issue among themselves, whatever route that discussion takes.
But since most people act on impulse, it shouldn't be difficult to imagine someone replying to a troll comment or a flame bait he read on page 1 of 9.

For someone who writes, comments the best feedback you can have. You spent an entire day writing an article that you believe it will be useful for everyone in your community, either a detailed point of view, a thorough explanation of something complex, an easy step-by-step procedure of a very difficult task, etc, the worst thing it can happen to you is getting comments from people that didn't take the time to read your entire article and are just firing away questions and remarks you address in the last pages of your article.

Derek Powazek of Fray.org fame wrote a book called Design for Community. There's a chapter called "Bury the post button" where he describes how comments got a gazillion times better after he put the post button in the last page of the story.
He's take is: the more clicks it takes, the better the posts will be. The distance puts away readers that are not really interested or engaged in the content.
I've applied this "philosophy" in several sites with remarkable results.

Comments are easy, articles are not!
My quick stats say that in every 100 members, all are capable of making comments, 2 can actually write articles, but only 1 doesn't suck.
Although comments should be encouraged, I believe that the priority should be protecting and nurturing writers.

Well, this is getting awfully long and personal although I intended to be totally unbiased =)
In this matter, I can write about my personal experience as a webmaster/developer and first hand contacts as a user.
There are hundreds of other applications for your article system I can't even think of, so don't forget to take that into consideration.