Hey, Harry. Sorry to not get back to you sooner -- I was out of the office for a couple days. Chat is definitely not something we've positively decided to implement yet, but I believe it could be very useful so I've been investigating and experimenting with it. I'm still in the early stages of that, basically figuring out which technologies might integrate with Mediawiki most readily, the advantages/disadvantages of each, and the effort-to-benefit ratio we might see. I wrote up a draft proposal, but have been pulled away from chat research for the last couple weeks by work on UploadWizard. It's not really complete (needs to be filled out, have references added, etc), but you can read what I've got down so far here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Raindrift/Chat_proposal Once again, please be kind, as it's not done. I'm posting now because the discussion is happening, so it's clearly the time to have it. :) You're right, spam is a possibility. I'm pretty confident that we could put effective anti-spam measures in place, though. Other sites manage such infrastructure without it being a serious problem. I'm confident we can do it too. I'm not sure this feature has to be controversial at all--nobody would be required to use it, and participation in the live-help functionality would be strictly opt-in. Providing a way to support new editors, answer their questions about policy, convention, and UI, and connect them to actual established community members seems pretty valuable. As far a concurrent editing is concerned, that's mostly a thing Neil K is looking at. We're working together inasmuch as whatever chat backend we use would ideally be general-purpose enough to be used everywhere such a thing is needed. Thanks for writing and getting this conversation started. -Ian