FWIW, I estimate that I spend 5-15 minutes every day dealing with spam on the existing LessWrong wiki and dealing with collateral damage from autoblocks, which would be ~3 hours a month; I don’t even try to review edits by regular users. That doesn’t seem to be included in your estimate of maintenance cost.
1,920 hours of SI staff time (80 hrs/week for 24 months). This comes out to about $48,000, depending on who is putting in these hours.
$384,000 paid to remote researchers and writers ($16,000/mo for 24 months; our remote researchers generally work part-time, and are relatively inexpensive).
$30,000 for wiki design, development, hosting costs
Dealing with spam shouldn’t be counted under “design, development and hosting”.
The first item establishes SIAI staff time cost at 25 $ / h. If the (virtual) server itself, bandwidth and technical expert maintenance is 500 $ / month, that still leaves 720 hours of SIAI staff-priced work in the “design, development and hosting” budget.
If we roughly quadruple your time estimate to 3 hours per week to combat spam, then that still leaves 720 hours − 2 years 52 weeks 3 hours/week = 408 hours, which still seems excessive for “design, development and hosting” considering that we have a lot of nice relatively easily customisable wiki software available for free.
Dealing with spam needs to be counted somehow for an open wiki, and if you go to closed wiki, then that needs to be taken into account while reducing the expected benefits from it...
FWIW, I estimate that I spend 5-15 minutes every day dealing with spam on the existing LessWrong wiki and dealing with collateral damage from autoblocks, which would be ~3 hours a month; I don’t even try to review edits by regular users. That doesn’t seem to be included in your estimate of maintenance cost.
Dealing with spam shouldn’t be counted under “design, development and hosting”.
The first item establishes SIAI staff time cost at 25 $ / h. If the (virtual) server itself, bandwidth and technical expert maintenance is 500 $ / month, that still leaves 720 hours of SIAI staff-priced work in the “design, development and hosting” budget.
If we roughly quadruple your time estimate to 3 hours per week to combat spam, then that still leaves 720 hours − 2 years 52 weeks 3 hours/week = 408 hours, which still seems excessive for “design, development and hosting” considering that we have a lot of nice relatively easily customisable wiki software available for free.
Dealing with spam needs to be counted somehow for an open wiki, and if you go to closed wiki, then that needs to be taken into account while reducing the expected benefits from it...