IRC/Channel renaming

October 2005 channel renaming

As of October 2005, a move is being made to bring the various Wikimedia IRC channels in line with the current Freenode naming convention. This means that, for instance, #fr.wikipedia will be moved to #wikipedia-fr, and #mediation.wikipedia will be moved to #wikipedia-mediation. This is because Freenode wants to have the project/group name at the beginning of the channel names, rather than at the end like current Wikipedia/Wikimedia channel naming.

The channel access lists, ban lists and other settings will be transferred to the new channel names and the impact on users should be minimal.

Redirects/channel forwards will be left in place at the old channel names for the moment, so that anyone who tries to join the old channel will instead be sent to the new channel name. This works in almost all IRC clients, although there are apparently a few minor issues in Irssi (like the channels being put out of order or something??).

Forthcoming naming scheme change

At the request of Freenode all Wikimedia IRC channels will be moving to new names some time in the future, the change will be that a channel previously named #wikipedia-de will be moved to #wikipedia/de, #wikipedia-en-arbcom to #wikipedia/en/arbcom and so on.

But how far in the future? Is there a plan for the name change somewhere? A list of which chans have changed their names?

The reason is that Freenode wishes to reserve names for projects, e.g. the project foo should hold jurisdiction over all #foo/* channels, our current naming scheme does not fit into this format.

See also: http://freenode.net/policy.shtml