On 10/23/07, Phoenix wiki <phoenix.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Transparency; no permanent record; encouraging cliqueishness; tends to encourage precipitous action and "echo chamber" style encouragement; leaves users/admins in other time zones out of the loop. Among others. -Matt

Could it be that many users simply can't get on IRC at their place of work, by perchance ? On 23/10/2007, Phoenix wiki <phoenix.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Nick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nick

Phoenix wiki wrote: My problem is that the time commitment is less flexible. With IRC, you have to sit around and in real time wait for people to say things, and respond. With mailing lists or talk pages, I can hop on for a few minutes, scan over what's been posted in the past few hours, and reply, and then go do something else again. I can queue up all my messages and read them on Saturday when I have more free time, or at 3am when I have more free time. With IRC I basically have to be there when other people are or it isn't particularly useful, and there's no meaningful way I can queue up things to respond to later. Etc. It's useful for planned, focused meetings, if you can work around the timezone issues, though I more often use Jabber or AIM for those myself. -Mark

I thought it was cute: http://xkcd.com/333/ (As with all xkcd comics, half the joke is in the "title" attribute for the img tag, which you get to see when you let the mouse hover over the image). - PeruvianLlama

On 23/10/2007, Phoenix wiki <phoenix.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: I participated on IRC regularly for some time a number of years back. I came to the conclusion that yes, it was great discussing things in real-time with other editors, but it wasn't always that sensible or useful. In the end, I found it too distracting to be logged on while doing other things, and because of my not considering worthwhile enough, thus I stopped logging on. I have similar reasons for no longer being as active an editor on Wikipedia - the concerns I have about the project aren't enough to stop me being involved, but are enough that I can't justify devoting much time to it. The mailing list is pretty good, as it requires very little effort to skim through threads and discussions, particularly using the interface of Gmail. I really appreciate keeping track at least of what kind of things are discussed here on the mailing list now that my personal activity on Wikipedia is lower. Zoney -- ~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...