irc.wikimedia.org

irc.wikimedia.org runs on IRCD, providing recent changes feeds on IRC for every Wikimedia wiki..

Use

We now have a a vastly superior RCStream service providing machine-readable push notifications over JSON websockets at stream.wikimedia.org, but until the key consumers of the IRC recent changes feed have migrated, this old service remains vital.

Its practical use ranges widely. From relatively low impact services, such as:

• pretty monitors (e.g. wikistream)
• edit bots that react to edits as they happen (e.g. bots that sign unsigned talk page contributions by anons)

... to much higher impact services:

• Countervandalism auto-revert bots (e.g. ClueBot alone finds and reverts over 1,000 edits every day on en.wikipedia.org alone)
• Countervandalism Network patrol feeds (e.g. CVNBot, monitors our 100s of smaller wikis that don't have active patrol teams or watchers)

When irc.wikimedia.org is down:

• ClueBot will be interrupted and any edits happening during time will never be looked into by it. This is comparable to having the AbuseFilter extension down.
• Patrollers (using RTRC, or Huggle, or STiKI) will not see the edits made during this time. This is comparable to having the recentchanges

SQL table temporarily ignore all write actions and thus pretty much hide activity from reviewers.

While it is most unfortunate that we rely on a bot to undo vandalism that should probably be prevented before saving (e.g. some kind of hook in AbuseFilter to consult ClueBot, could be ran natively on the cluster perhaps one day), and it is most unfortunate that most of our patrolling efforts indirectly rely on irc.wikimedia.org, that is the reality and it is important that we know its impact and the kind of sensitive treatment it deserves.

See also

• IRCD
• irc://irc.wikimedia.org (channels like #en.wikipedia, #commons.wikimedia, #nl.wikipedia, ..)