5. Discussion
5.1. Main Results across Communities
The first objective [O1] of this paper was to assess the growth, stagnation, and decline patterns in Wikipedia language communities. Contrary to what was generally assumed from previous research, which was mainly focused on English and other major language editions [5,14,16], we found that not all Wikipedia language editions are in stagnation or decline. We have seen notable exceptions: communities that are still growing, such as Arabic or Chinese among the large language editions, and Hebrew, Greek, and Turkish, among the middle ones. Taking into account the 50 largest communities, results show that only half of them stagnate or decline; major language communities mostly tend to stagnation or decline, while middle and smaller ones are mostly still in the process of growing larger.
We can hypothesize a variety of factors influencing these different patterns, related to external factors, e.g., Internet access, geopolitical context, number and demographic composition of a language’s speakers, language status (official language or not); and to internal factors, i.e., calcification of policies [7], community dynamics [22,44], conflict [45,46], community identification [47], platform usability [26], among others. While in this study we focused on investigating the state of the active community, developing simple indicators for capturing these internal and external factors would be an interesting approach to explain how they may specifically affect the growth, stagnation and decline patterns of different language communities.
We can hypothesize a variety of factors influencing these different patterns, related to external factors, e.g., Internet access, geopolitical context, amount and demographic composition of a language’s speakers, language status (official language or not); and to internal factors, i.e., calcification of policies, community dynamics, technical complexity, platform usability, among others. While in this study we focused on investigating the state of the active community, developing simple indicators for capturing these internal and external factors would be an interesting approach to explain how they may specifically affect the growth, stagnation and decline patterns.
The second objective [O2] was to create a set of indicators to capture different aspects of growth and renewal within communities. We introduced the Vital Signs as a framework to measure and monitor the community composition, both in terms of the entire group of editors and of those dedicated to special functions (technical aspects and coordination, beyond adminship). Thus, through indicators such as renewal, we can study the degree of success in terms of getting new editors to settle in the community, and others, like stability or balance, tell us also about the capacity of the community to engage its members over time. These indicators were designed while taking into account usability and ease of interpretation. By being consistent in the definition and selection of certain variables (e.g., time-frames, very active editor, etc.), we tried to ease their interpretation.
For example, choosing “very active editors” for the study of community balance in terms of different generations was a practical choice aimed at understanding the most productive part of the community (in fact, responsible for about 85% of the registered editors’ edits). While this is necessarily a limited view of the community, at the same time it gives the idea of the state of renewal among the most productive group. In an analogous way, studying the time in which flags were granted to administrators is also an exercise of simplicity; even though there exist other user flags, administrators constitute the largest group of editors with considerable rights and responsibilities [37].
Vital Signs depict a similar situation across communities following the same patterns (between decline and stagnation: Catalan, English, German, Italian, and Polish; growing: Arabic, Swahili and Afrikaans). Among the former group, we have seen that communities show signs of balance in terms of the different generations, thus community renewal is occurring. At the same time, on a monthly basis, a 15–30% of the active editors has been editing for more than 24 months in a row. In contrast, in the communities from the latter group, the group of very active editors is composed mainly (over 60%) by members of the
