I don't think you realize how little helpers there actually are. A lot of responses, as is, go unanswered. We don't need increased participation in #wikipedia-en-help, unless it's increased participation from helpers and not helpees.

From,
Emily

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 11:30 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for finding that page. I don't know how much that kind of chat system would help our editor numbers but it's worth discussing. Any comments from the Growth and EE teams?

Pine

On Aug 12, 2014 8:10 PM, "quiddity" <pandiculation@gmail.com> wrote:

The pro and cons of web-chat, and some technical options are collated at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Live_Chat_System

(especially the 2nd-to-last section, for "Why not IRC?")

IRC makes followup discussion, or time-delayed discussion, too difficult, if the user doesn't use their identical username, and state their home-wiki. Also, it shows IPs if users don't obtain a cloak first.

However, just for informational purposes, here are links for easy comparison:
https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/test
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#test

( the default client uses http://www.qwebirc.org/  )

HTH,

Quiddity

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 4:45 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

That proposal could be considered in the long term, but right now we have plenty of people who seek and get help on IRC, and we can make incremental improvements to their experience faster than we can build a new tool from scratch. Few newbies fail hard at IRC. The basics are similar to texting and private instant messaging software. Let's improve the newbie user experience.

Pine

On Aug 11, 2014 1:48 PM, "Nathan" <nawrich@gmail.com> wrote:

Newbies are going to fail hard at IRC. Pretty much all of the questions Seb
poses for a built-in newbie chat still exist with a built-in Freenode
interface, with the addition of a complicated and often difficult (not to
mention culturally... unique) environment. Much better to think along the
lines of the Teahouse, but live. You can jump into a chat queue, and people
who want to help chat with you, and you can close the chat whenever you
want, and you can't contact people outside of the queue using chat.
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