Jimmy Wales wrote:
There are many many times when I need to quietly ask a group of trusted editors to look at a problematic article -- for example, we get a complaint from someone fairly obscure, on a topic I know nothing about, and I look at the article and it is obvious crap. The channel is already proving useful in that regard.
There's an obvious security problem here, of course, in that you have no way of knowing that someone who claims to be a given admin and who then gets into the channel is actually that admin.
So I wouldn't recommend its use for stuff that *really* has to be kept to sane insiders, with "admin" as a rough approximation to "sane insider" ('cos we don't *usually* get admins who are completely batshit). But it would be useful in that sense as a saner sounding board than the average day on #wikipedia. OTOH, you could probably get as good results on #wikimedia in many ways ...
- d.