[Wikipedia-l] #wikipedia changes

Hello all, I am writing to introduce a number of changes to #wikipedia. The aim of this is to improve the channel's image and to make it more useful for everyone. The changes are being initiated this afternoon (GMT) and I hope to have them done pretty quickly. 1: New contacts The channel will now be managed by Mark_Ryan and Dmcdevit (their IRC nicks, as most of us probably know them). At the moment it's pretty ad hoc and so we (the [[m:IRC Group Contacts]]) that it might be a good idea to put someone and a deputy very clearly with the responsibility so that we don't get "who do I go to for this...?" with the response "not me" from everyone, a common online scenario, or so I've observed. 2: New guidelines/rules Together with some community input (although of course more is welcomed - it's a wiki, so let's take advantage of that) we have written some new guidelines for user and operator conduct at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_guidelines/wikipedia>. These are a lot more enforcable than the old ones. The key thing is that operators will try and resolve issues with words rather than powers whenever possible. 3: New operators We realised that the op list was becoming a bit messy. Additionally, we're not sure that all operators are in agreement on the above guidelines. We decided that it would be a bit pointless to ask them to enforce guidelines they didn't support and do so using methods they preferred not to use and so we have opted to clear out the access list and start afresh. We welcome new applications from our experienced operators to rejoin the team. On this note we are going to be a little more formal on application for this, as only the contacts named above will have the authority to manage the ops team. The key thing with all these changes is to make #wikimedia-ops more useful, and to ensure that operators use words rather than technological 'force' wherever possible (as a rule of thumb, in the majority of cases where their intervention is required). We aim to keep a list on meta of these ops too to make it easier for people to get in touch with them. You may be wondering if this applies to places other than #wikipedia: not now, but we are considering rolling it out elsewhere if it proves a success. Stay tuned! Thank you for your support. Yours, Sean Whitton Wikimedia IRC Group Contact http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sean_Whitton -- —Sean Whitton (seanw) &lt;sean(a)silentflame.com&gt; http://seanwhitton.com/