Are bot cloaks being done now that you can do Wikipedia and Wikimedia cloaks? Mike
-----Original Message----- From: Sean Whitton [mailto:sean@silentflame.com] Sent: July 27, 2008 6:08 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Foundation-l] First IRC Group Contacts 'surgery' held this evening,cloak backlog (almost) cleared (yay)
Hello all,
I'm writing to update you on some exciting changes in Wikimedia's IRC situation.
Firstly, Ryan Postlethwaite organised a meeting on IRC this evening to discuss the problems we've been having of late. It went very well: I had a chance to explain the situation and clear up any potential misconceptions, and users pointed out that James and I are not fantastic at *appearing* active as lots of stuff happens in the dark. You can read a log of the meeting at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Surgeries/July 2008/Log, but I'll summarise my explanation of the situation.
Basically, freenode realised in January that our paperwork for our group contact status is badly out of date and in some cases simply missing. So I was told that I could only set wikimedia/ cloaks (which I have been doing in the usual batches since I learnt I could set these), and just this week we learnt that James can set wikipedia/ cloaks. While we continue to wait for freenode to redo our paperwork (no idea of an ETA, we poke the right person every few weeks as a reminder though), we are now setting wikimedia/ and wikipedia/ cloaks. Other cloaks will remain in the system and will get set as soon as we are able to.
There was much other discussion about the role of the contacts but it would be better to read the log if you want to know about it: I wouldn't do the discussion justice by summarising it here.
Secondly, the huge backlog of wikipedia/ cloaks have now been set where possible (some users seem to have dropped their nick registration while the requests have been waiting). Woohoo! This was because we finally learnt this week that James can still set cloaks in this namespace.
Thirdly, it was decided we should hold such meetings more often. And as noted above, people asked for more transparency with contact actions. So I present a raft of new pages on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Log -- log of cloaks and access changes http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Surgeries -- surgery planning and logs http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Noticeboard -- status updates rather like this e-mail.
I hope you'll join in with my excitement at all this.
Sean Whitton for the IRC Group Contacts