generation who started editing between 2016 and 2020. This is consistent with the stability indicator, which shows that, for 40–75% of the monthly active editors, this was their first month of editing.
On the other hand, the contrast between the two types of communities is clear, especially with respect to these two indicators, balance and stability. The three communities from our sample that are growing have a difficulty in engaging their editors on the longterm. However, at the same time, their retention rate is also declining, which means that they may not be entirely unaffected by the factors that matter for helping editors survive their first weeks. On the other hand, we see that for all the communities analyzed the proportion of newer generations in specialized functions (technical editors and coordinators) is smaller than in the overall group of very active editors. This means that these core functions of the community present a higher risk in terms of lack of renewal.
Likewise, admins who have a strong voice and an implicit influence on the community discussions showed signs of lack of renewal. Even though some languages continue granting flags, they tend to give them to editors who started editing in the first ten years from the creation of Wikipedia, and the overall distribution of generations is very skewed towards old-time editors. We believe that this delivers a message of closure to any potential new candidate. In the open debate on power concentration in the Wikipedia community [20,22], we believe that ensuring pathways are open to new editors to become administrators might make the project less oligarchic and help tearing down the barriers that block newcomers.
The third and last objective [O3] of this paper was to validate the indicators with results from a sample of language communities and explore their potential role in affiliate planning. We approached the communities in three conferences and two dedicated sessions in which we asked them the same questions. While there were some discrepancies on the value of indicators for administrators and global community, the rest of them received full support. In particular, Wikimedia Poland (with whom we actually started the Vital Signs, after a conversation on their needs for monitoring the state of the community) received them enthusiastically and have already started thinking about how to develop some community actions to improve on retention and special functions, based on our results. We employed a focus group approach because at the moment there is no prototype of a dashboard in which to allow a constant interaction with the Vital Signs. The sessions were useful in order to collect new ideas and to perceive the general attitude towards the metrics.
We validated the specific configurations in terms of the key variables for the metrics (e.g., the definition “very active editors” and time-frames) and graph types. Some requests on having more granularity on some metrics were collected for the dashboard implementation. These indicators have been computed locally on a server for the purpose of this study, but we foresee the implementation in a website architecture on the form of an interactive dashboard: https://vitalsigns.wmcloud.org/ [accessed 22 February 2022]. This will allow us to make our results available in real time for all the existing communities, and to collect their feedback in a more structured way.
5.2. Setting Growth-Based Goals (Affiliates and WMF)
Once Vital Signs indicators have been validated by the affiliates, we should discuss the possibility of using them to set growth-based goals and use them as a baseline to progress towards specific targets. In the focus group sessions with relevant members from the communities, we found out that they considered that improving on these indicators was mostly a task for affiliates, especially in the current moment, when the Wikimedia Strategy 2030 (Meta contributors, ’Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations’, Meta, discussion about Wikimedia projects, 16 August 2021, 09:29 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations&oldid=21885801 [accessed 19 February 2022]) discourse has set community growth and inclusiveness as a priority, and the Wikimedia Foundation is developing many interface improvements in the Growth team.
