immediately. Even though this VisualEditor allows the user to edit without necessarily having to deal with the wikitext code, it does not prevent editors from accessing and modifying directly the wiki markup code if they prefer. Nonetheless, to date, in many Wikimedia projects including English Wikipedia, the VisualEditor is not set as the default editor and needs to be manually set as a personal preference (Wikipedia contributors, ’Wikipedia:VisualEditor’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 January 2022, 22:22 UTC, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:VisualEditor&oldid=1068523898 [accessed 19 February 2022]), thus its existence may go unnoticed for the newcomer.
More recent studies such as Gluza et al. [26] assessed user experience in editathons by using participatory observation and found that participants experience moments of frustration, especially concerning the usability of the editor and when navigating a complex bureaucracy of policies and procedures. This was also related to gender gap, as Hargittai and Shaw [27] explained the lack of women in the community is worsened by a technical skills gap. This means that people’s background and knowledge prior to learning about Wikipedia literacy are critical factors that determine whether they will be able to succeed in this process, or frustration will lead them to abandon.
Cowan [28] states that feeling judged by other peers in a wiki creates concerns for new editors, who may be anxious about the quality of their contributions, in particular about their accurateness or validity, in front of the entire community or even readers. Not only feeling judged, and having one’s edits removed (reverted) are powerfully demotivating– most specifically, new editors are reverted by much more experienced editors [29]. The opposite is also true; community spaces like the “Teahouse” in the English Wikipedia and their equivalents in other languages serve as a place where newcomers can ask more experienced editors questions on any topic, from the process of contributing content, to the use of their personal User Pages, and may help to encourage new editors’ participation [30].
In an experiment, Morgan and Halfaker [31] found that new editors invited to the Teahouse are retained at a higher rate than editors who do not receive an invitation, even when controlling for the newcomer’s activity and survival. The Wikimedia Foundation has been working with different teams over the past years (2014 Growth (MediaWiki contributors, ’Growth/Growth 2014’, MediaWiki, 22 August 2021, 09:43 UTC, https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Growth/Growth_2014&oldid=4775153 [accessed 19 February 2022]); 2017–2018 New Editor Experiences (MediaWiki contributors, ’New Editor Experiences’, MediaWiki, 25 January 2022, 14:02 UTC, https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=New_Editor_Experiences&oldid=5036441 [accessed 19 February 2022]); 2018–2022 Growth Team (MediaWiki contributors, ’Growth’, MediaWiki, 1 February 2022, 18:44 UTC, https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Growth&oldid=505095 5 [accessed 19 February 2022]) to understand the first days of an editor and personalize the newcomer experience. Currently, the product teams like “Growth” are aimed at creating new structured tasks to retain newcomers. These tasks usually provide a more guided experience aimed at learning how to edit, solving minor content issues, and requesting attention from a more experienced editor.
In summary, community decline and stagnation have been largely assumed as an endemic problem to Wikipedia. In this subsection, we have explored the factors that are related to it and that prevent the entrance of newcomers, according to previous literature. Given the focus on the English Wikipedia and other major languages in previous studies, we aim to verify the state of the active communities for more language editions, in order to achieve a global view. For this reason, our Objective 1 [O1] is to assess the growth, stagnation, decline patterns in the history of Wikipedia language communities.
2.2. Community Health and Renewal
As early as 2009, the Wikimedia movement started a strategy process, which included a task-force dedicated to debate about the state of what they called Community Health (Strategic Planning contributors, ’Task force/Community Health’, Strategic Planning, 15 August 2010, 17:45 UTC, https://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Task_force/
