Article
Community Vital Signs: Measuring Wikipedia Communities’ Sustainable Growth and Renewal
Marc Miquel-Ribé1,* 
, Cristian Consonni2 and David Laniado2
| Citation: Miquel-Ribé, M.; Consonni, F.; Laniado, D. Community Vital Signs: Measuring Wikipedia Communities’ Sustainable Growth and Renewal. Sustainability 2022, 14, 4705. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14084705
Academic Editors: Rosta Farzan, Amy Babay and Claudia López Received: 20 February 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
1Tecnocampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08302 Mataró, Catalonia, Spain
2Big Data & Data Science Unit, Eurecat-Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya, 08005 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; cristian.consonni@eurecat.org (C.C.); david.laniado@eurecat.org (D.L.)
* Correspondence: mmiquelr@tecnocampus.cat
Abstract: 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. 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; they can constitute a valuable reference point to foresee and prevent future risks. 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.
1. Introduction
Wikipedia has reached its second decade of life, and it is one of the largest multilingual and collaborative free-knowledge repositories in the world. The project is undeniably successful along many dimensions: from its popularity and geographical spread to its adoption even among professionals and academia. Its online community has been the object of amazement and debate in equal parts.
Since its foundation in 2001, Wikipedia’s model has become referential for many other online communities. According to [1], online communities are shaped by the social interactions, the policies that guide them, and the design of the software they are using. Some projects can give rise to strong cultural norms that guide community members to create valuable outputs, be they an article in an encyclopedia or free software.
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.
In 2005, along with growing popularity on the Internet, the number of registered editors on Wikipedia rapidly increased until obtaining a critical mass of participants
