[Foundation-l] Proposed guidelines in our IRC channels

[Stephen Bain]

On 10/13/06, Damian Finol <damian at igluve.org> wrote:
>
> Like the message I left to James F, a few weeks ago I had a college
> professor who joined the IRC channel when he needed help (I'm talking
> about the Spanish Wikipedia channel #wikipedia-es) and the amount of
> profanity, childish behavior and more led him to tell me "Wikipedia
> isn't a serious project" which I replied "The IRC Channel is not the
> same as the Wikipedia" and then he pointed the page at Wikipedia-es
> where it says to join the channel as "official" support, to which of
> course I had to concede.
>
> I don't think that setting some rules to be followed on the IRC channels
> is bad, it's upping the quality of the conversations and channels; is
> not, sometimes stop goofing around, but maybe make it a little more
> serious, removing profanities and related things.

I agree. The channels are distinct from the projects, as they are a
place for the community to congregate and interact off the wiki, the
playground to complement the workspace. But that shouldn't mean that
it's open slather, since as your example demonstrates, it's still
likely that the channels will reflect on the projects, no matter how
we try to distinguish them.

I don't see any reason why the same standards of behaviour (civility,
etc) that are applied on the projects shouldn't be adopted as
principles on the channels. They don't have to be all business, but
people should still play nice.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com