The current WMF error message (viewable here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/& ) encourages people to join #wikipedia when the site goes down. This causes a flood of largely loud and unhelpful users whenever there is an issue.
To my knowledge, this was added years ago and has simply been kept in the error message without much thought. Nowadays, there are tens of people idling in #wikipedia and #wikipedia-en who can report any issues to the appropriate place.
The "You may be able to get further information in the #wikipedia channel on the Freenode IRC network." line should be removed and the other translations should be modified as well.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement