and especially over 60%, it may be an indicator of a lack of capacity to engage and stabilize the community. High percentages of fresh editors are only desirable when the number of active editors is growing.
[T3] Long-time editors: with regard to the target for editors engaged for a long time, i.e., active for more than 1 year, a target share of around 33%, given as the sum of the 13–24 and >24 bins, seems appropriate. This value is indicative of a solid community able to carry on with long-term Wikiprojects and activities.
4.2.3. Balance
In Figure 6, we see the composition of the “very active editors” every year by lustrum of the first edit for the selected language editions. Since the birth of Wikipedia in 2001, we have five lustra: 2001–2005, 2006–2010, 2011–2015, 2016–2020, and 2021–2025. We can consider these periods as “generations.” For the oldest and most-established projects, such as English, German, Italian or Catalan, these 5-year periods also translate relatively well into different phases of growth of these projects. Very active editors are defined as those who make at least 100 edits per month. They are a very valuable group of editors since they account for most of the registered editors’ edits (e.g., in the Italian Wikipedia, 85% of the registered editors’ edits every year are performed by very active editors).
We argue that all generations should contribute to this group of editors because this would bring a balance of perspectives to the project. The graph shows the yearly number of editors who have been very active for at least one month. As the years go by, we expect the number of very active editors from younger generations to take a bigger share of the total, while the older generations shrink gradually. The graphs show that, in most cases, the percentage of very active editors who started editing during 2001–2005 has undergone only minor variations in recent years. For example, in the Polish Wikipedia, this percentage was 11.51% in 2014 and 9.13% in 2020, which means it has only slightly decreased in six years.
The first generation seems to be especially strong in the German Wikipedia. In Figure 5, we observe the prominence of the second generation, made of users who registered between 2006 and 2010, that maintained a higher share than the following generation in all cases but for Arabic; the initial period, and in particular the 2006–2010 lustrum seem to represent a time in which a group of very active editors established in the community, and maintained this position until now, leaving limited space for the following generation of editors. This is particularly true for Afrikaans, Catalan, German and Polish, where this lustrum still represents over 30% of the very active editors. The last generation, made of editors registered between 2016 and 2020, reaches a share of over 80% for Swahili, 68% for Arabic, 56% for English and 50% for Italian, while for the others it has lower values; we see an especially low proportion, around 30%, for German and Catalan.
In conclusion, with respect to RQ3 [Balance], we observe a general tendency to create an established group of very active editors from older generations of editors, that leaves more or less space to newer generations in different language editions.
[T4] 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. Although they might be at the end of their lifecycle and the growth may have occurred with the following generation (2006–2010). The share of every previous generation will inevitably decrease over time.
