Figure 9. Vital sign: Administrators. Left: number of administrator rights (flags) granted by year, broken down by editor generation (lustrum of the first edit) represented with different colors. Middle: total number of admins by generation on the last month of available data (August 2021). Right: number of active admins, and percentage with respect to the number of active editors (in August 2021).
4.2.6. Global Participation
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.
The first one describes participation in Meta-wiki-also known in short as Meta-used within the Wikimedia movement for coordination, documentation, planning and analysis. Whilst the main language is English, Meta pages are available also in other languages. Community members, in this context called Wikimedians, are usually editors of local Wikipedia communities. Thus, we characterize the participation to Meta-wiki by each Wikipedia language community. Even though participating in Meta-wiki may not have a direct impact on a community language edition, we argue that it serves an important function in the global Movement, and it is strategic in terms of knowledge sharing and governance.
