Affiliates can play a key role in terms of leading the discussions on performing the necessary changes to drive the growth of the communities. Mainly because of two reasons: they are organized structures with strong communication capacities, and they are formed by community members who have an incidence in the on-wiki decision-making spaces. Not only it is possible that they send the message to their members through the communication channels (e.g., mailing list), but they can also coordinate with other affiliates to do the same. Affiliates are organized and set plans with objectives, they have the advantage of being able to focus some resources, but also count on the energy of their members who volunteer in their activities.
In their annual plans, affiliates usually set indicators to measure the amount of content (e.g., number of articles, their size, number of images), rather than the number of newcomers retained or number of active editors. To start, this may require a cultural shift—focusing on people and not only on content. Additionally, there is a problem of accountability, e.g., improving on retention requires changes in the technology usability as well as in the community behaviour towards newcomers. Since the first depends on the developments proposed by the Wikimedia Foundation and the latter on the actual editors, this could dissuade affiliates from taking such commitment. On the contrary, rather than letting each stakeholder loose, they are in the best place to coordinate these efforts and create joint strategies.
In some cases, this may appear even as a more daunting task for affiliates, especially for languages spread across multiple countries (e.g., the German Wikipedia is supported by Wikimedia affiliates located in Germany, Austria and Switzerland), which would require stronger efforts on planning and impact assessment. The actions could range from creating mentorship programs aimed at accompanying newcomers through the first edits to giving rewards to experienced editors or starting a general update on the policies to improve the readability.
However, to date, we believe the most important barrier is that of not being able to understand how to measure success and set reasonable targets. This study makes available some fine-grained indicators on active editors, and enables affiliates to set growth-based goals and KPI targets. We have suggested some specific targets in order to facilitate the task to affiliates. Even though we acknowledge that growth should be coordinated across all stakeholders and supported for every community, we must recognize that each of them has its own idiosyncrasy, and therefore they should revise the targets based on their specific situation, capacities and aspirations.
5.3. Limitations of This Study and Future Steps
We see several rich directions for future research. First, although we have demonstrated that decline and stagnation are not generalized among Wikipedia language communities, we have seen that a majority of the large ones follow this trend. Previous literature already showed that peer-projects often find their peak and then decline in number of members due to a process of calcification of its inner structures [5,7]. Languages like Arabic or Chinese present the characteristics of large language editions, but show patterns of thriving communities, and at some point they might find a peak. We argue that it is necessary to further analyze growth, stagnation and decline patterns along with internal factors such as community dynamics, and external factors such as the social, political, economic, geographical and demographic context of each language.
With the Vital Signs, we presented a set of simple metrics aimed at easy use and dissemination among community members in order to encourage the deployment of strategies to grow. Future studies could go deeper on the analysis of the relationship between the active community size, the registered editors, the retained editors, and the editors who abandoned the project in order to properly explain growth. We have seen that the number of registered editors tends to be stable on a monthly basis. Therefore, we can consider that unless there are spikes of editors leaving the community, increasing the retention rate will lead to community growth. We believe it is important to keep in mind
