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