[Foundation-l] Status of cloak requests

Tue Feb 26 14:36:15 UTC 2008

On 26/02/2008, Paul Williams <paul at skenmy.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:

> > A question that has been raised for some time. Freenode has issues
> > beyond just the IRC cloaks.  Why aren't we having an
> > irc.wikimedia.org?  There's really no good reason beyond "that's just
> > the way it is."

> I have considerable experience in running IRC servers and networks. They
> aren't particularly resource intensive - and the customisation facilities
> are massive if you have backend access.
> Just give me a shout if you need anything regarding this and i'd be more
> than willing to help out.

Lots of people around Wikimedia and its projects use IRC very
effectively as a working tool, but the social project fallout on en:wp
in particular from IRC use and suspicion of it is ... remarkable. (See
the recent arbitration case for an example.)

One important and useful byproduct of the Foundation's hands-off
approach to Wikimedia IRC on Freenode is being able to tell people
complaining to the Foundation to go away and ask James or Sean, both
of whom are highly practiced in telling spurious complainants "no."

I suppose if we had our own server they could get the job there too
and do it in a similar way ... "Here, James, Sean, have this excellent
chalice. Only a little poison!"

- d.