WereSpielChequers wrote:
One of the areas that I would like to see the foundation putting in money is for the running and maintenance of wanted orphan bots.
I think specific examples might help here. If we're talking about category renaming bots or talk page archiving bots, I wouldn't mind if they died. The key is having suitable replacements in place first, of course.
Employing a python programmer or two somewhere cheap like India or South America would not be a huge investment for the foundation, but it would be a valuable service to the community, and unlike mediawiki development this could be completely volunteer driven with wikimedians deciding which bots are worth maintaining and their relative priority.
Do you have a ballpark estimate of how much money we're talking about per year per programmer? I'm mostly just curious how it would compare to hiring someone in San Francisco, for example.
Was the Wikimedia Foundation intended to be a technology company? Is the current Wikimedia Foundation suited to be a technology company or would it be better off contracting out development? These are probably higher level questions, but they're inter-related with what we're discussing here.
But more to your point about hiring cheaper labor, we don't know if a popular tool means that the approach taken was the best or should be sustained. We ideally want scalable, sustainable, and secure tools. I'm pretty wary of the idea that we could easily outsource this work.
MZMcBride