[Foundation-l] First IRC Group Contacts 'surgery' held this evening, cloak backlog (almost) cleared (yay)

[Sean Whitton]

Hello all,

I'm writing to update you on some exciting changes in Wikimedia's IRC situation.

Firstly, Ryan Postlethwaite organised a meeting on IRC this evening to
discuss the problems we've been having of late. It went very well: I
had a chance to explain the situation and clear up any potential
misconceptions, and users pointed out that James and I are not
fantastic at *appearing* active as lots of stuff happens in the dark.
You can read a log of the meeting at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Surgeries/July
2008/Log>, but I'll summarise my explanation of the situation.

Basically, freenode realised in January that our paperwork for our
group contact status is badly out of date and in some cases simply
missing. So I was told that I could only set wikimedia/ cloaks (which
I have been doing in the usual batches since I learnt I could set
these), and just this week we learnt that James can set wikipedia/
cloaks. While we continue to wait for freenode to redo our paperwork
(no idea of an ETA, we poke the right person every few weeks as a
reminder though), we are now setting wikimedia/ and wikipedia/ cloaks.
Other cloaks will remain in the system and will get set as soon as we
are able to.

There was much other discussion about the role of the contacts but it
would be better to read the log if you want to know about it: I
wouldn't do the discussion justice by summarising it here.

Secondly, the huge backlog of wikipedia/ cloaks have now been set
where possible (some users seem to have dropped their nick
registration while the requests have been waiting). Woohoo! This was
because we finally learnt this week that James can still set cloaks in
this namespace.

Thirdly, it was decided we should hold such meetings more often. And
as noted above, people asked for more transparency with contact
actions. So I present a raft of new pages on meta:

<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Log> -- log of
cloaks and access changes
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Surgeries> --
surgery planning and logs
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts/Noticeboard> --
status updates rather like this e-mail.

I hope you'll join in with my excitement at all this.

Sean Whitton
for the IRC Group Contacts