On December 31, 2011 there was an appeal by jimbo that tried to scare the readers that they have only a few more hours to make the donation, but today is January 2 and they still are running their appeal only in "Thank you" form. According to Sue Gardner WMF taken down their fundraising banners, because WMF hit their target, yet the banners are still there. Don't they understand that such practice is dishonest?

Obviously Jimbo's castle fund is not yet complete.

You'd damn well better get used to this. They took a page from the public-broadcasting
world, and made begging an essential part of the "Wikipedia experience". In the future
it will not be possible to use WP without being harassed for money.

(You can thank Sue Gardner for this, if you must find someone to "blame".)

At least it's being done with very crude XSS coding, so the banners can be blocked fairly easily.
The next step would be tracking cookies that they can use to watch users, plus "targeted delivery"
of content. Maybe even sell that info to advertisers, so Wikipedia won't have obvious ads--everything
is "hidden" from the ignorant average user. The only thing slowing this up is the "free-culture"
attitude of the volunteers, and general incompetence at the WMF. But you can bet they are talking
to consultants, and the consultants are telling them to do these things.

Are we taking bets yet on whether Facebook Plugins will be integrated by the end of the year?

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if their initial "experiments" with that sort of thing somehow pointed people to wikia. No charge for that of course, because it will only be an "experiment".

Well, here we go