Whenever I interact with other Wikipedians or anyone else in a full conversation, I rank my preferences for medium as follows:
- Face-to-face
- with video conference
- voice conference
- live chat
- messaging through Wikipedia or email
I frequently contact Wikipedians to talk with voice and video. I have done this enough to know that many Wikipedians are not accustomed to other people reaching out to them off-wiki, and many are surprised.
It is not my intent to keep conversations private. I can arrange for voice or video conversations to be recorded and posted on-wiki. It also is not my intent to break anyone's anonymity. Depending on a person's desires, it may be possible to have a live voice chat without me knowing someone's real email or other identifier, but for anyone who would not share their voice with me a live voice chat is usually but not always impractical.
If I write to you and want to talk, it is not because I want to hide the conversation or because I am doing something strange. Many people like to talk to other people; I am one of them. That is the only meaning behind my request. I have talked by phone with hundreds of Wikipedians that I did not otherwise know and only because of interactions that I had briefly with them online.
If you do not want to voice chat with me then that is fine - we can keep it on-wiki.
Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:18, 4 December 2013 (UTC)