Figure 4. Vital sign: Retention. Number of registered editors by month (left axis, grey bars) and retention rate over time (right axis, orange line) as the percentage of new editors who edit at least once 60 days after their first edit.
4.2.2. Stability
In Figure 5, we see the number of active editors on a monthly basis, broken down by the number of months in a row they have been editing, represented with different colors for different ranges. Grey represents editors for whom this is the first month, which can either mean that they had never edited before, e.g., it is their first month ever, or that this is the first month after a break from editing. For example, in the Polish Wikipedia, fresh editors in a given month are about 35–40% (in grey), while the percentage of editors that are active for a long period of time (>24 months) is around 20%. This is similar for other language editions, like German, where the percentages are 33–35% and 25%, respectively, or Italian with 40–45% and 15–18%. For younger, less established communities, like Arabic Wikipedia, these percentages are very different. The share of editors active for only 1 month is up to 66–72%, and the long term engaged editors are forming only 3–4.5%. With respect
