Research talk:Ideas/Helpdesks on Wikipedia

IRC

How exactly is webchat not accessible? PiRSquared17 (talk) 00:46, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

• Hi,

By accessible and non accessible, I mean from the Point of view of the newcomer. If the location is readily available and mentioned in various common locations where the helpee is likely to visit, then I've called the location as accessible, otherwise inaccessible. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 01:20, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

I would also add that the IRC webchat interface is confusing to many people. I introduced half a dozen newbies to IRC at the Seattle Hackathon on Saturday, and most of them were daunted by the process of creating a temp username, and confused by all the cryptic, scrolling messages in the bare bones webchat interface. I enjoy the flexibility of IRC myself, but expect that many newcomers will turn away due to knee-jerk confusion and intimidation. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 23:03, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks for that point Jonathan, and I do agree to it. I've seen plenty of helpees just closing the page after opening it, and of the ones who didn't, there have been a few who commented that the interface was confusing, and it took a while to figure it out. Added it to the list.

Also, pinging PiRSquared17 for the previous reply. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 23:28, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Can you be more specific about how it can be improved? There is already a lot of documentation of IRC, but I understand new users won't read it. In some ways, it's more intuitive than the current (pre-Flow) system of talk pages, which many new editors have seen. PiRSquared17 (talk) 00:28, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17 I agree that Wikipedia talk itself is quite confusing, but that's a discussion for another day. As for the IRC, Wikipedia uses the freenode webchat, which may not be the best solution in the long run. If there was some way we could have developers make an IRC client to our specifications, or maybe go in for a completely different interface other than IRC altogether. In any case, those possiblities are a discussion for another day. I'm kindof hoping this research, whenever it is done, would be able to get us an idea of what is supposed to be fixed, and what to be scrapped. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 11:12, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Just swinging by

I just wanted to stop in to say thanks TheOriginalSoni. This is really well fleshed out. I hope to return to this soon with some data. No promises that will be soon though. :\ --EpochFail (talk) 15:23, 12 November 2013 (UTC)