in several languages, including English, French, Italian, Japanese, German, and Polish. Nonetheless, in 2007, the English Wikipedia peaked in the number of active editors (51,000) and started declining (e.g., 30,000 in 2014). Academic studies presented the overall decline in active editors on the English Wikipedia as a consequence of the trade-off between having to manage content quality and having massive participation, that led to a more closed system calcified against changes-especially those proposed by newcomers-in the form of policies, among other aspects [5–7].
In the face of those who predicted its end, Wikipedia has become more valuable over time. Its content has become the information backbone of the Internet. In addition, Wikipedia is fundamental for search engines that use it to improve their results and display articles from the encyclopedia prominently, thus sending readers to Wikipedia [8].
The success of Wikipedia led to the creation of other projects promoting other forms of free-and-open knowledge, called “sister projects (Wikipedia contributors, ’Wikipedia: Wikimedia sister projects’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 February 2022, 11:55 UTC, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikimedia_sister_projects&oldid=1070232453 [accessed 14 February 2022].)”: from Wiktionary, an online dictionary and thesaurus, to Wikidata, a collaborative and free knowledge base. This ensemble of projects and its participants, collectively known as the Wikimedia movement, has spread worldwide. Several non-profit entities promoting Wikipedia and free knowledge have appeared. (Meta contributors, ’Wikimedia movement affiliates’, Meta, 16 November 2021, 20:41 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_movement_affiliates&oldid=22343786 [accessed 14 February 2022].) The first one of these organizations to be born was the Wikimedia Foundation, based in the United States, which also hosts and runs Wikipedia’s servers. These local and thematic organizations are collectively called “Wikimedia affiliates” and they promote the Wikimedia projects by organizing activities and events and providing an interface for the Wikimedia movement with public institutions and the media.
Wikipedia proved that an online community could rally around a peer production project to create and grow content. However, questions around the health of the Wikipedia community at large remain open. For example, several community members advocate for more inclusive spaces and aim for a more diverse representation of editors and content [9]. We wonder what could help the movement to regulate itself, becoming aware of the state of growth or decline of the active Wikipedia language communities, and lowering the barriers to participation without losing the social structure that allows keeping quality standards.
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. (Wikimedia Statistics-English Wikipedia-New registered users, https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/new-registered-users [accessed 16 February 2022].) Less established language editions like Arabic are instead still experiencing a growth phase, but other aspects related to the stability of the community may be of concern and can forecast upcoming problems. Furthermore, some editors cover special functions that are fundamental for the communities, such as administratorship or technical editing, and may deserve a special attention.
Thus, we propose three objectives to study the sustainability of the active Wikipedia language communities:
- Objective 1 [O1]: assess the growth, stagnation, decline patterns in the history of Wikipedia language communities.
- Objective 2 [O2]: design a set of indicators to capture the degree of growth and renewal within communities.
