On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 8:40 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com 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.
As I've said elsewhere to people, this isn't an excuse for fracturing the discussion. Using a single channel for development *and* support has worked for *years* until the Usability Initiative decided it needed its own channel.
The channel is not actually that busy if you don't count the bots. And for those of you who *really* don't like them, you can /ignore them. I don't consider people asking for help "noise" either, it's part of being engaged with the community.
I don't see the need for a separate development channel at all.
-Chad