In ten years time, I predict the Foundation will raise $3 billion: http://i.imgur.com/hdoAIan.jpg ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: James Salsman &lt;jsalsman(a)gmail.com&gt; Date: Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 9:01 PM Subject: $55 million raised in 2014 To: Wikimedia Mailing List &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Happy new year: http://i.imgur.com/faPsI9J.jpg Source: http://frdata.wikimedia.org/yeardata-day-vs-ytdsum.csv I don't mind the banners, although I am still saddened that several hundred editor-submitted banners remain untested from six years ago, when the observed variance in the performance of those that were tested indicates that there are likely at least 15 which would do better than any of those which were tested. Why the heck is the fundraising team still ignoring all those untested submissions? But as to the intrusiveness of the banners, I would rather have fade-in popups with fuschia <blink><marquee> text on a epileptic seizure-inducing background and auto-play audio than have the fundraising director claim that donations are decreasing to help justify "narrowing scope." Best regards, James Salsman _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

3 billion being...above the upper bound of the extrapolation you've made? Uh-huh. Extrapolation is not a particularly useful method to use for the budget, because it assumes endless exponential growth. I can see the budget increasing due to us increasingly taking on the responsibilities we've previously been unable to do anything about, but I can't see what we'd actually /do/ with 3 billion dollars (although if we want to expand the Hadoop cluster with most of that I would, of course, be most grateful ;p) On 2 January 2015 at 04:23, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation