On Freenode #mediawiki-i18n recently has been the translatewiki.net channel (though earlier it was also used for Language Team stuff), and @Nikerabbit has now moved it to #translatewiki on Libera Chat. Does the language team plan or want to use #mediawiki-i18n on Libera Chat?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering#Contact_us does not list IRC, so it's at least consequent. :)

Like Andre says, this is not a recent change but the status quo just made more clear. The Language team does not use IRC, apart from me and Abijeet and maybe others irregularly. Also, the mediawiki-i18n mailing list is basically unused and if I were to decide I would archive it and direct future messages to wikitech-l. But this means that right now no good way to chat with the Language Team.

I have a question for you all: How would you like to contact the Language team if you wanted to ask for opinion or feedback or help?

Not to discourage anyone from answering, but I think IRC is out of the question unless there is bridging to Matrix or similar.

I will continue to answer to any i18n/language/translation related questions on the #translatewiki IRC channel, but it won't be the official way to contact the language team.

Does the language team plan or want to use #mediawiki-i18n on Libera Chat?

Evidently no, per Niklas.

Also, according to my logs, the last time I saw some WMF Language Team matters discussed on that channel was in 2014 or perhaps 2015. After all, MediaWiki i18n has not been the focus of the WMF Language Team (in its various names) for some 8 years now, I think.

MediaWiki i18n is handled by the translatewiki.net staff, which happens to include some WMF employees. So the #mediawiki-i18n channel was synonymous with the #translatewiki channel (which is a redirect) and still is.

I suggest to redirect #mediawiki-i18n on the new network to translatewiki. It's simply an inversion of redirects, nothing much to see.

In T283378#7104849, @Nikerabbit wrote:

I have a question for you all: How would you like to contact the Language team if you wanted to ask for opinion or feedback or help?

IRC is easiest just because most technical development already happens there. Mailing list/Phab/Gerrit is good for asynchronous communication.

Not to discourage anyone from answering, but I think IRC is out of the question unless there is bridging to Matrix or similar.

Libera Chat should have a native Matrix bridge soon(TM). Another options might be to have the channel be canonically hosted on Matrix and bridged with wm-bridgebot/similar for IRC users.

In T283378#7104868, @Nemo_bis wrote:

MediaWiki i18n is handled by the translatewiki.net staff, which happens to include some WMF employees. So the #mediawiki-i18n channel was synonymous with the #translatewiki channel (which is a redirect) and still is.

I suggest to redirect #mediawiki-i18n on the new network to translatewiki. It's simply an inversion of redirects, nothing much to see.

+1, make sense to me.

In T283378#7104849, @Nikerabbit wrote:

Like Andre says, this is not a recent change but the status quo just made more clear.

Oh, absolutely, I didn't mean this to say that you were wrong to make this clear. This is a request to the Language Team's management about changing the status quo.

Not to discourage anyone from answering, but I think IRC is out of the question unless there is bridging to Matrix or similar.

That's disappointing, but oh well. There's bridging to Telegram and Matrix available, of course, if you wish it.

I will continue to answer to any i18n/language/translation related questions on the #translatewiki IRC channel, but it won't be the official way to contact the language team.

Yeah, however there are a few Language Team-maintained things that point people to MediaWiki-Internationalization as an official contact point in various places; should these be removed?

• Translate, in composer and on-wiki
• Babel, in composer
• ContentTranslation, in composer and on-wiki
• UniversalLanguageSelector, in composer
• the abandonware(?) TestLanguageNameGrammar, in composer

We shouldn't advertise a space we don't want to encourage use of, nor distract the brilliant work TWNers do with semi-related unofficial requests.

Happy if management decide as such to re-purpose this task to "stop encouraging people to use IRC as an official support channel for Language Team products; it isn't" or similar.

I'll go over those references once move to #translatewiki is complete.

I have updated most references to the channels. I kept #translatewiki for Translate, removed for others.

I'm currently thinking that best option could be creating #wikimedia-language on Libera.Chat that would be bridged to a channel Wikimedia Language Team in Telegram.

Change 739480 had a related patch set uploaded (by Nikerabbit; author: Nikerabbit):

[mediawiki/extensions/Translate@master] Update IRC channel and add docs link to composer.json

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/739480

Change 739480 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/Translate@master] Update IRC channel and add docs link to composer.json

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/739480