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User:Friday/OOB

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For a look at the strengths and weaknesses of IRC as a medium, see User:Geogre/IRC considered.

Is it useful to consider the history of IRC usage by Wikipedians? I suspect it's been around since the early days, since a lot of the early 'pedians were also IRC users. Wikipedia has grown since those days- it's now a top 10 website, and we've already recognized that getting it right is generally preferable to getting it fast. Has IRC grown along with Wikipedia? Are practices that were appropriate in the old days still useful?

I think it's time to forget what we think we know, and take a fresh look at IRC. By encouraging people to use it for discussion of Wikipedia matters, we're encouraging fragmentation of discussion. At the very least, we need some advantage of IRC to offset this disadvantage.

The only advantage I've heard of that I can buy off the top of my head is speed. Yes, IRC can be faster for having discussions. Discussions chopped up into tiny little sound bites, that is. If someone wants to put together a set of multiple sentences to express a coherent train of thought, this advantage of speed quickly starts going away. (But, it's not my intention for this page to duplicate Geogre's analysis.)

Every once in a while, something bad happens in IRC that spills over into the wiki, and this issue comes up again. An interesting question to ask is this: pretend IRC isn't already ingrained. Pretend you'd never heard of it, and someone suggested for the first time that some of what gets done on-wiki get done there instead. What would your reaction be? Would you see particular advantages or disadvantages?

Here's why this problem can't be solved by normal means: The very people supporting and defending the various chat rooms are the same people the Arbcom has found to have engaged in unacceptable behavior there. (Is this really true? My memory tells me that it is, but there is the evidence for this?) Whatever the plausible cover story is for the existence of these channels, we can already see the real reason for them: the people involved enjoy their high-school style cliques. They enjoy being the rulers of their private little domain. Obviously, we cannot trust these people to make reasonable decisions about these chat rooms, while keeping in mind the best interests of Wikipedia. That ship has already sailed- they have already demonstrated that their loyalty lies with some chat room instead of with Wikipedia.

Here's the crux, in my opinion: If people are using some back channel to sit around badmouthing other editors, saying the kinds of things that would not be tolerated on the wiki, we need to stop promoting the use of these backchannels by linking to them from on the wiki. You want to be separate? Great, good luck to you, but keep your advertising off the Wikipedia. Simple.

One very alarming thing (to me) is that some chat room denizens see no problem at all in using these chat rooms to engage in sexually explicit chat with minors. Is this not a canonical example of the type of behavior that could bring the project into disrepute? Do the people saying there's nothing wrong with this really have such piss-poor judgment? To me, it's blindingly obvious that we can't have such stuff in any channel remotely associated with the project.

The chat room crowd claims that the solution is to bring in more "fresh recruits" to keep things under control. But they've already demonstrated that they can't keep their house in order. They claimed last year they'd be cleaning up the chat room, and they have very obviously failed to do so. We can't be too hard on them for this- I'm sure it's not an easy job. But we ought to recognize the failure rather than bury our heads in the sand. But at least they had their chance to clean it up. Now that they've failed, we should consider other options.


What ArbCom has said about IRC

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