On 2 January 2015 at 15:08, James Salsman <jsalsman@gmail.com> wrote:

Oliver Keyes wrote:
>
>... Extrapolation is not a particularly useful method to use for
> the budget, because it assumes endless exponential growth.

I agree. Formal budgeting usually shouldn't extend further than three
to five years in the nonprofit sector (long-term budgeting is
unavoidable in government and some industry.) However, here are a
couple illustrations of some reasons I believe a ten year
extrapolation of Foundation fundraising is completely reasonable:
http://imgur.com/a/mV72T

Words tend to be more useful than contextless images.

>... I can't see what we'd actually /do/ with 3 billion dollars

I used to be in favor of a establishing an endowment with a sufficient
perpetuity, and then halting fundraising forever, but I have changed
my mind. I think the Foundation should continue to raise money
indefinitely to pay people for this task:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service

That is equivalent to a general computer-aided instruction system,
with the side effects of both improving the encyclopedia and making
counter-vandalism bots more accurate. As an anonymous crowdsourced
review system based on consensus voting instead of editorial
judgement, it leaves the Foundation immunized with their safe harbor
provisions regarding content control intact.

It's also not worth 3 billion dollars (no offence, Aaron!) as evidenced by the fact that it can be established with <20k.

This is not a discussion for research-l, this is a discussion for (at best) Wikimedia-l - and I have to say that I don't feel it's at all useful even /there/, but it is at least in context. Spending time discussing pie-in-the-sky "what would we do if we had 3 billion dollars" ideas is all well and nice, but I prefer to think that time is better spent doing research with the resources we have now, and editing with the resources we have now, and making pitches for additional resources as and when they become available. So on that note: I'm going to go off and do that.

Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation