Greetings!
We've been discussing it on the IRC channel. There's consensus we
should stop sending new folks there and requiring the research team to
maintain it. But there's a also a sense that it's not hurting anybody
and might even be useful if folks want to idle there. I tend to ask a
question there every year or so, and will likely continue as long as
there are people that will answer. There are, in fact, a lot of folks
are idling there.
To take this off of the WMF Research Team's plate, I've volunteered to
take over ops on the channel and will try to keep it alive (e.g.,
kicking out spammers). We'll update docs to make it clear it's
unofficial and to make sure we don't doesn't claim that it is a first
order way to get your question answered. But we won't close it down or
kick people out. And new folks are, of course, welcome.
It that sounds like a horrible idea, please speak up. If you in the
channel, have some experience with mod bits on IRC and are willing to
volunteer to take ops and moderate, maybe get in touch with me?
Regards,
Mako
{"quotation": {"who": "Isaac Johnson via Wiki-research-l", "date": "Tue, Feb
10, 2026 at 11:20:43AM -0500"}}
> Hey folks,
> For many years, there has been a channel on IRC called #wikimedia-research
> where folks could post questions about research related to the Wikimedia
> projects and collaborate [1,2]. This channel has been quiet for quite some
> time now. I believe the last major usage was for questions during the
> monthly Research Showcase but we stopped that practice a while ago due to
> low usage. Given that the usage has been very close to zero for a long
> time, I'm proposing that we shut it down to reduce confusion about its
> level of support/interaction and remove the need for moderation (for the
> occasional spam etc.).
>
> If you have any concerns about this, please let me know by February 20th.
> Otherwise, I'll work on officially shutting it down and changing references
> to it from the wikis to mostly direct folks to
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Index and this listserv.
>
> [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Channels
> [2]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask_a_question/FAQ/Research#How_do_I_communicate_with_the_research_community
> ?
>
> Best,
> Isaac
> -- Senior Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
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>
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
https://mako.cc/
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