I don't think there's much benefit to Wikimedia actually hosting IRC
channels since freenode already does that better than we could.
However, it would be useful if Wikimedia would create web gateways to
IRC for those without IRC clients. You can easily customise different
gateways for different Wikiversity courses. See
http://irc.wikia.com/marvel/ for an example of one made for the Marvel
Database Project. It uses the open source CGI:IRC program available
from
http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/. I don't know of a reason for
Wikimedia not to host these gateways, but if they really won't, I
expect that Wikia would be happy to do this.
Angela