Marc Miquel-Ribé, Cristian Consonni and David Laniado

“ The sustainability of a project is often presented as a problem of growth at its initial stages since it demands heterogeneous contributors [2,3] , with varying levels of resources and interests [4] . Wikipedia’s use of wiki technology lowered the barrier to participating in its online community, allowing anyone to register and modify articles anonymously. Wikipedia attracted many early volunteer editors thanks to its broad scope to make the sum of human knowledge freely accessible and shareable, an ethos that resonated with the hacking culture of the early years of the World Wide Web. ”

“ We argue that we need a new set of metrics that can give a more nuanced picture of the health of a community. The picture for each community is more complex than what can be captured only by the number of active editors, and each project has a different history. For example, large language editions like English and German have experienced a decline and stagnation in the absolute number of monthly active editors, but the number of newly registered users every month remains stable, proving the initial interest of people to become Wikipedians. ”

“ In this section, we focus on indicators about cross-project participation. We argue that cross-project participation is needed to foster a global community, and it has several added benefits: from content growth, because an article missing in one language edition can be translated from other languages, to community growth, because training or recruiting initiatives and events that work for a community can be transferred to others. ”

“ Based on our interpretation of the data for a wide array of Wikipedia language editions, we estimated a set of target values for each of the Vital Signs of what it might constitute a healthy, renewing community with growth potential. We think that these targets are reasonable for established communities (more than 50 active editors per month) who have achieved a critical mass that allows them to be sustainable in all the necessary tasks to develop a Wikipedia language edition. ”

“ Opposite to a stable community, a very volatile one changes the active editors every month. While this can be seen as a sign of renewal, we may also see the possibility of a sudden drop in participation and incapacity to sustain activities such as covering topics related to the news. Community stability is simply the aggregation of individual measurements of editor loyalty, i.e., their recurrence over time. ”

“ Given the imbalance of contributions, they usually account for the vast majority of the registered editors’ edits; for example, in the case of the Italian Wikipedia, the 85% of the registered editors’ edits every year are performed by very active editors. Therefore, by taking the very active editors, we are observing the part of the community that is responsible for the production of most of its content. ”

“ In summary, community decline and stagnation pose a significant risk for project sustainability. In this section, we have identified 6 aspects that capture the general and specific functions Wikipedia communities and subcommunities undertake to ensure their growth and renewal. Even though there have been several studies and Wikimedia Movement initiatives focusing on community health, neither the academic sphere nor the Wikimedia communities can anticipate the risks of a community decline. ”

“ Wikipedia is an undeniably successful project, with unprecedented numbers of online volunteer contributors. After 2007, researchers started to observe that the number of active editors for the largest Wikipedias declined after rapid initial growth. Years after those announcements, researchers and community activists still need to understand how to measure community health. ”

“ Future studies could go deeper on the analysis of the relationship between the active community size, the registered editors, the retained editors, and the editors who abandoned the project in order to properly explain growth. We have seen that the number of registered editors tends to be stable on a monthly basis. Therefore, we can consider that unless there are spikes of editors leaving the community, increasing the retention rate will lead to community growth. ”

“ We believe that obtaining values for the capabilities of the current active community of editors in these areas can constitute a reference point to plan to guarantee transparency and openness in these areas, to observe growth and renewal, and at the same time, to foresee and prevent future risks. ”

“ Languages like Arabic or Chinese present the characteristics of large language editions, but show patterns of thriving communities, and at some point they might find a peak. We argue that it is necessary to further analyze growth, stagnation and decline patterns along with internal factors such as community dynamics, and external factors such as the social, political, economic, geographical and demographic context of each language. ”

“ What is the composition of Wikipedia language communities in terms of multilingual editors?
The sixth and last vital sign is global. Participating in the “global community” (i.e., the Wikimedia Movement) is key for language communities to make their voice heard and learn from others. ”

“ At the same time, at community level, there are no processes set to revise the help pages and simplify their language, encourage interface improvement, or any other change that would demonstrably help newcomers survive the first days.
We believe that coordination between the organized and non-organized structures of the Wikimedia movement, i.e., on the one hand, Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates, and communities, on the other hand is essential to growing larger and more diverse communities. ”

“ Community special functions refer to those non-editing activities which are essential to growing the Wikipedia language edition, like, for instance, technical editors and coordinators. Technical editors are those who create the bots, the templates, and even do some changes to the platform. ”

“ The second indicator of cross-wiki is given by the proportion of editors from each language community whose primary project is another Wikipedia language edition. As said, the primary language of an editor is simply the one in which has made more edits. Receiving contributions from editors whose project is another Wikipedia language edition is an opportunity to grow content. ”

“ In this paper, we study patterns of growth, decline and stagnation, and we propose the creation of 6 sets of language-independent indicators that we call “Vital Signs”. Three focus on the general population of active editors creating content: retention, stability, and balance; the other three are related to specific community functions: specialists, administrators, and global community participation. We borrow the analogy from the medical field, as these indicators represent a first step in defining the health status of a community ”

“ In this subsection, we explain the importance of measuring community growth as a matter of project sustainability and set the ground for designing a set of indicators that describe the state of the active community. ”

“ Movement Strategy conversations are held by Wikimedia Foundation staff, Wikimedia affiliates members and staff, as well as community members.
Nevertheless, having established these goals at the Wikimedia-movement level is not effective if the communities do not embrace growth and renewal strategies as an important matter and enable the changes that effect them. In this sense, we believe the indicators we suggest will shed light on the sustainability of the current community and will become a reference baseline. ”

“ Global participation refers to the capacity of a Wikipedia language community to engage in global conversations and spaces usually held in Meta-wiki as well as to attract members from other communities while having a strong local base of contributors. ”

“ Still, the quality of the atmosphere in terms of nontoxic language, editor satisfaction with the tools, among many other indicators, can be complementary to reach the same goals.
Affiliates recognize the role they have in pushing the necessary changes for renewal/growth, as they are constituted by community members. Having detailed community-oriented indicators can encourage them to set growth targets and complement the content-creation existing ones that are typical in the affiliate annual plans.
Renewal may be considered a positive aspect conducive to a sustainable community. ”

“ While in this study we focused on investigating the state of the active community, developing simple indicators for capturing these internal and external factors would be an interesting approach to explain how they may specifically affect the growth, stagnation and decline patterns of different language communities. ”

“ Likewise, admins who have a strong voice and an implicit influence on the community discussions showed signs of lack of renewal. Even though some languages continue granting flags, they tend to give them to editors who started editing in the first ten years from the creation of Wikipedia, and the overall distribution of generations is very skewed towards old-time editors. ”

“ Generally, session participants considered that the editors in the community have an important role in directly or indirectly improving it, followed by affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation. They also recognized the importance of the features designed by the WMF Growth Team, and overall, they believed that improvements in the user experience would have an impact. In addition, they recognized that a more organized approach to mentorship would also be a valuable tool to improve newcomer retention, given the complexity of tools, policies, and tasks a new editor has to learn about. ”

“ This pattern, already visible for active editors with RQ3, is even more marked for editors having special technical functions, pointing out a lack of renewal for this kind of profile. Community building on this group of contributors is highly encouraged. Given the scarcity of editors who engage in technical contributions, renewal and balance among generations are even more important. For this reason, it can be concerning that a community is overrelying on older editors, and it is not capable to attract technical editors from the younger generations, as in the case of Catalan. ”

“ Whether power is concentrated in a few hands or more distributed, the current content quality management and bureaucratization have an adverse effect on welcoming newcomers, engaging younger generations in the project, and including peripheral editors. Assuming this trade-off, we observe a lack of a conscious and explicit assessment of the balance between the two goals in the community decision-making processes. ”

“ Last generation: We believe a growing share of the last generation until occupying between 30–40% may be reasonable for a language edition that is not in a growth phase—larger when it is. We considered every generation to be 5 years (a lustrum) , so, as a rule of thumb, we suggest that the last generation occupies from 15 to 40% depending on the years which have passed since its beginning (1–5) .
[T5] First generation: In addition, a share of editors of at least 5–15% from the first generation (typically 2001–2005) seems a desirable target as well. ”

“ This study makes available some fine-grained indicators on active editors, and enables affiliates to set growth-based goals and KPI targets. We have suggested some specific targets in order to facilitate the task to affiliates. Even though we acknowledge that growth should be coordinated across all stakeholders and supported for every community, we must recognize that each of them has its own idiosyncrasy, and therefore they should revise the targets based on their specific situation, capacities and aspirations. ”

“ While topic availability or exhaustion can hardly explain this decline, observed for encyclopedias of very different sizes, we might think that the number of potential contributors in a society plays a role in community growth. ”

“ We present our analysis for eight Wikipedia language editions, and we show that communities are renewing their productive force even with stagnating absolute numbers; we observe a general lack of renewal in positions related to special functions or administratorship. Finally, we evaluate our framework by discussing these indicators with Wikimedia affiliates to support them in promoting the necessary changes to grow the communities.
Keywords: Wikipedia; online communities; editor engagement; growth; renewal; decline; stagnation; indicators and Renewal. ”

“ Admins have rights and responsibilities in performing actions over the content and take a key function for the community. We propose three different indicators:
Admins by year: number of admins by year of flag granted and by generation. Admins by lustrum: total number of active admins by generation at the current month. Admins ratio: ratio between the number of active admins and the number of active editors in a specific month. 3.2.6. Global participation
RQ6 [Global-Meta-wiki] How are Wikipedia language communities participating in global projects spaces (Meta) ? ”

“ We see several rich directions for future research. First, although we have demonstrated that decline and stagnation are not generalized among Wikipedia language communities, we have seen that a majority of the large ones follow this trend. ”