[Foundation-l] Wikimedia main office

[Austin Hair]

On 5/26/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I don't find IRC (or "chat" generally) a useful or efficient means of
> communication.  Email gives enough space that people can look up
> sources, consider their positions and arguments, read other material if
> necessary, and then respond.  IRC is a mixture of off-the-cuff and
> prepared remarks, broken up into small bits with a lot of asides and
> chit-chat that you have to sit through in real time.

I agree that IRC is next to useless when you have any sizable number
of people involved, especially since most such "meetings" are poorly
moderated or not moderated at all; but for small, well-behaved groups,
it's a good medium between the careful but time-consuming
consideration of e-mail and the real-time demands of a conference
call.  And for one-on-one interaction, I prefer it to the telephone
for the same reason you prefer e-mail.

> There are some projects that use it effectively, but most projects I've
> been involved with have dropped it pretty quickly in favor of the
> mailing lists.  The exceptions are ones with a high proportion of people
> who hang out on IRC to socialize anyway.

Yeah, I'm one of those guys.  I've been connected more or less every
day for the last ten years, I've administered IRC networks, I've
written tons of IRC daemon code.  You'll be hard-pressed to find a
bigger IRC geek than me, so it should be no surprise that I'm an
advocate of it in general.  It's not a proper substitute for
face-to-face contact, though—Wikimania 2005 was probably the most
productive week in wiki history; certainly in Wikimedia history.

On the topic at hand, however, I find the mailing list more productive
as a whole.  Any kook can rant, sure, but it's actually easier to
ignore him via e-mail.

Austin