the distinction between the two concepts, and at the same time encourage a further study on the causes of retention and constantly evaluate strategies that might increase its rate.
Other dimensions of the editing experience that should also be analyzed in relation to a lack of retention are discussion patterns, toxic language, mentorship, among others. We believe that having an indicator for each of them could also be valuable in order to complement the Vital Signs. However, we must also acknowledge that we purposely made an effort in reducing the number of indicators to six Vital Signs, so that they can be easily managed and remembered. While there could be more Vital Signs, each of them could also include more in-depth indicators. Additional Vital Signs could include a dropoff rate, to measure the number of consolidated editors who stopped editing in a given year [48]. The number of active administrators could be complemented by the number of administrative actions. In addition, it would also be interesting to show whether the editors that are participating across multiple projects are also those who are very active, take special functions or have an admin flag. In this sense, the concentration of functions and ultimately skills has not been measured.
Finally, we must acknowledge the limitations of the approach followed to collect feedback from stakeholders. While the validation of the Vital Signs would have benefit from a more extensive survey, for example using quantitative methods, we decided to present in multiple Wikimedia conferences and have qualitative insights as we believed it fitted the context. In Wikimedia, every development needs to happen according to the values of transparency and inclusivity, and thus, it requires having multiple presentations so that the heterogeneous set of communities can learn about it and give their opinion. The feedback we collected was rich, and enabled improving on the metrics and their visualizations.
Interactive Dashboards Website
The positive and in several cases enthusiastic feedback received also convinced us to start the design of an interactive dashboard and convert the metrics into a tool. As this is still work in progress, we show in Figure 12 two screenshots of the implementation of this tool for the indicators retention and balance, obtained using Plotly (Plotly, https://plotly.com [accessed 19 February 2022]). for data visualization. In Addition to the website, we are also working on the creation of a bot to update data tables on Meta-wiki, one for each Vital Sign. These table will allow editors to follow specific indicators and use them to sort and compare Wikipedia language editions, in the same way they do for example in the List of Wikipedia by number of articles (Meta contributors, ’List of Wikipedias’, Meta, discussion about Wikimedia projects, 1 January 2022, 12:46 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Wikipedias&oldid=22522344 [accessed 19 February 2022]). Making the Vital Signs present in Meta-wiki closes the loop and ensures that Wikipedians can find the indicators at the places where they usually search for Movement-related information. The graphs and tables available on these two spaces will be updated on a monthly basis as new data are available.
