Community_Health&oldid=73740 [accessed 19 February 2022]). This new term was coined to discuss aspects related to burn-out and editing fatigue, as well as the potential impact of reverts and community norms on the recently detected decline in the number of contributors.
Studying the state of the community through the lenses of “health” allowed looking for solutions in order to apply them as treatments. Projects like the Community Health Initiatives Metrics Kit (Meta contributors, ’Community health initiative/Metrics kit’, Meta, 1 January 2022, 07:46 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Community_health_initiative/Metrics_kit&oldid=22521662 [accessed 19 February 2022]). led by the Wikimedia Foundation Trust and Safety team attempted to design a set of metrics (2016–2017), although they were never implemented. Later, the work was redirected towards the development of anti-harassment tools (Meta contributors, ’Anti Harassment Program’, Meta, discussion about Wikimedia projects, 16 February 2022, 17:40 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti_Harassment_Program&oldid=22848016 [accessed 19 February 2022]). and the study of toxic language (Meta contributors, ’Research:Detox’, Meta, discussion about Wikimedia projects, 22 May 2020, 23:00 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:Detox&oldid=20109435 [accessed 19 February 2022]).
Community health has become a strategic priority for the Wikimedia movement also in the Wikimedia strategy process 2030 (Meta contributors, ’Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Working Groups/Community Health’, Meta, discussion about Wikimedia projects, 21 June 2021, 16:57 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working_Groups/Community_Health&oldid=21624042 [accessed 19 February 2022]). The Community Health Working Group discussed for more than two years to create recommendations to elaborate a Universal Code of Conduct, among other initiatives that would possibly improve editor diversity and retention. However, we believe that, while propositive solutions are essential, there is a need to have clear measurements that allow assessing progress.
In this subsection, we explain the importance of measuring community growth as a matter of project sustainability and set the ground for designing a set of indicators that describe the state of the active community.
2.3. Indicators for Community Growth and Renewal
There are some implicit risks in not planning for community to thrive. Measuring the state of the active community is not only important to understand its potential growth but also the risks of such sudden decline. Because even when there is no growth, and there is stagnation, there could be community renewal. In fact, lack of renewal would be worse, as it would mean that the end of the active editors’ lifecycle would result into the disintegration of the community.
The most valuable metric to understand the size of the community is the number of active editors. These are those editors who made at least 5 edits in a month (MediaWiki contributors, ’Analytics/Metric definitions’, MediaWiki, 24 October 2021, 11:36 UTC, https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/Metric_definitions&oldid=4884329 [accessed 19 February 2022]). Very often, the community of active editors is regarded as the real community. However, there are no indicators to understand the state of renewal of the active community, in general, as well as of those parts of the community which perform specific functions.
Regarding growth and renewal for the entire community of active editors, we identified the need to measure three specific aspects: (a) retention of newcomers, (b) stability (monthly variation of editors), (c) balance between generations of editors. In addition, given that the development of Wikipedia requires other tasks than editing articles, we also consider it necessary to measure growth and renewal for specific functions or subparts of the community: (d) special functions (technical editors and coordinators), (e) administrators and other flags, (f) global participation into the movement spaces.
