On 03.09.2010, 4:40 Roan wrote:
- Shut down #wikimedia-dev (formerly #wikipedia_usability, kind of).
The explicit purpose of the channel is to allow development discussion with less noise, but "noise" here means community involvement. In community development, you do get a lot more discussion, but that's not something you should try avoiding. In general, use existing discussion fora wherever possible, and if you do fragment them, make sure you don't have too much of a staff-volunteer split in which fora people use.
No, "noise" means bots and people trying to support people with questions like "how do I disable anon reads on my wiki" as opposed to developers (paid and unpaid alike) being engaged in a design discussion. Maybe #wikimedia-dev should be renamed to #mediawiki-dev to remove the suggestion of WMF-exclusivity, but I definitely see the value of a channel dedicated to communication between developers with support questions and bots kept out.
It should ultimately be decided whether MediaWiki is a software developed by an open community for everyone to use, or just a software that runs Wikipedia and is sporadically released to public only for lulz and Wikia? If it's the latter, such "noise" is indeed unwanted. If the former, this chit-chat is vital to being a part of the community.