Tdfdc

On-wiki chat

Hi! I'm here to briefly address some potential issues with real-time chat on wikis.

1. You're selling it as something social, which leaves a bad taste in most users' mouths. Especially when you invoke Facebook and Skype instead of established systems that most of the movement are familiar with (like IRC or XMPP), you cause people to be cautious and guarded. I would suggest talking about chat in terms of chat, not in terms of other systems. Talk about the benefits, talk about the cool features, but try not to point at a specific system or people will use their impressions of that system to judge yours.
2. Chat is not trivial. It would mean another service running somewhere, which is a complication for our ops people, another point of failure. It would also mean a lot of worrying about how to deal with bans, blocks, kicks, privacy, etc. etc., which is maybe too much complexity. Who will be implementing this system, anyway?
3. You seem to be assuming that IRC is not effective because overall it has fewer users than other platforms, but you don't talk about users in our community, you talk about users in general. Give us the numbers that show that IRC is ineffective for the projects and the movement, and we might be able to talk.

Just a few first-run things I see that could cause trouble. I'm generally in favour of the move towards TogetherJS, but I don't see any reason to rush it. VE integration will take a while anyway. --MarkTraceur (talk) 22:59, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

The movement? :) Well, I would assume that some percentage of the movement members might be using Facebook and Skype. In any case, I didn't propose to use their systems, but merely proposed to select the features that have been successful, and will be of use in the Wikipedia environment.

On-wiki Chat is not trivial, indeed. It will require a lot of resources, as well as new Guidelines.

I feel it will attract more new users, will turn occasional editors towards being more permanent, will facilitate dispute resolutions in a faster and perhaps more effective way.

I have observed that IRC is being used mostly by admins and experienced editors. Other editors do not use IRC at all, or at best use it very occasionally.

Do you agree with the assessment as outlined above?Tdfdc (talk) 14:48, 10 January 2014 (UTC)