Can we get exact numbers for these rate limits? "low", "medium", "high", and "very high" aren't very useful in the context of me trying to figure out if I should drop everything I am doing and allocate the next week to implementing OAuth 2.0 support for my bots and other hobby projects. One thing I will say about this change is that while I do completely understand that there is a need to cut down bot traffic to our servers, a change that involves rate-limiting contributor workflows, especially those who are performing (often) load-bearing moderation tasks, does not feel like a good way forward. Also, implementing OAuth 2.0 (and subsequently getting it approved) for support is non-trivial, especially for "home-grown" bots. Absent any evidence that community-run "home-grown" bots are the root of this problem, I feel like asking them to implement such a solution is counterproductive in this context.
A few points wrt to some other parts of the announcement:
Otherwise, authenticating using session cookies or OAuth 2.0 will grant a higher limit.
What about bot passwords (and OAuth 1.0a, as other folks have asked)? Note that adding OAuth 2.0 support is currently a significant burden compared to simply providing a proper UserAgent (which was the previous policy). I don't even know how I would implement OAuth 2.0 support for my Go bot (and random Python script) without spending a non-trivial amount of time reviewing the associated documentation.
Request the bot flag from your local wiki community
To my knowledge, this is also not a trivial process in many communities (e.g., enwiki). If I need to start a month-long (or more) discussion just to retrieve (say) the data for all recently reverted edits to perform my own analysis and/or make 1000 edits using Pywikibot, I feel like a contributor might ask/feel: "Will it be easier to just not do this task?"
Use Wikimedia Enterprise APIs for high-volume usage
This is the part I'm extremely uncomfortable with. I feel very strongly that community members who are contributing in mission-aligned ways should not be asked to shift to use a closed-source, monetary contributions-gated, out-of-date version of our own data that they have spent hours curating. I feel this is a very clear line in the sand: community members should NOT have to pay (i.e., buy/sign up for an Enterprise subscription) to access Wikimedia data. If we ever end up in a scenario where a contributor feels compelled to pay for a Wikimedia Enterprise account, we have done something seriously wrong. (The only caveat to that statement is if we have a contributor who founds an AI startup/Google alternative, or similar)
Regards,
Sohom Datta
---
Open-source contributor @Wikimedia