multilingual editors may not have the same level of commitment and could stop editing that language edition at any moment.
- RQ6 [Global - Meta-wiki] How are Wikipedia language communities participating in global projects spaces (Meta-wiki)?
- RQ7 [Global - Local] What is the composition of Wikipedia language communities in terms of multilingual editors?
Focusing on these six aspects, we will measure growth and renewal for the editor community and its subcommunities covering specific functions and propose some specific indicators.
2.3.7. Roadmap
In summary, community decline and stagnation pose a significant risk for project sustainability. In this section, we have identified 6 aspects that capture the general and specific functions Wikipedia communities and subcommunities undertake to ensure their growth and renewal. Even though there have been several studies and Wikimedia Movement initiatives focusing on community health, neither the academic sphere nor the Wikimedia communities can anticipate the risks of a community decline. For this reason, our Objective [O2] is to design a set of indicators to capture the degree of growth and renewal within communities.
2.4. The Role of the Wikimedia Movement Affiliates
In this section, we want to give an overview on the Wikimedia Movement and how each actor relates to community growth and renewal. There are three different actors with different rights and capacities. Firstly, the communities of volunteers who edit the content. Secondly, the Wikimedia affiliates, are local organizations with some geographical or thematic scope with the aim of supporting one or more Wikipedia language editions or Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia affiliates are composed of editors, whose engagement does not only imply editing, but also volunteering in creating local activities (e.g., workshops known as editathons, importing catalogues from museums, etc.). Finally, the third one, the Wikimedia Foundation, is responsible for product development and general support to the movement.
On the one hand, at a community level, we explained the difficulty of setting community growth and renewal as priorities for community members. Editors’ activities are centred on creating new content and improving the existing one when they are not fixing errors or vandalism. As seen in previous research, there is a trade-off between focusing on quality control and staying open. Low editor retention can be explained in the calcification of rules, but also negative social interactions such as edit reverts and lack of usability in the system. Community members decide which interface changes to accept and which policies need to be modified. Since their focus is on content quality, they may not be aware of the low retention and the impact of not enabling changes.
On the other hand, at the Wikimedia Foundation level, there has been active research on editor engagement and retention for more than a decade. Different teams have proposed some interface changes and improvements that proved to raise retention but were never implemented at large scale. Some other tools and initiatives were specifically related to ensuring trust and safety and improving general community health. Likewise, at the level of the strategy of the Wikimedia movement, community health and growth have been largely discussed and set as goals priorities in different occasions from 2009 until 2020, in the form of recommendations and principles (e.g., being people-centered (Meta contributors, ’Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Movement Strategy Principles’, Meta, discussion about Wikimedia projects, 27 June 2021, 22:34 UTC, https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Movement_Strategy_Principles&oldid=21653121 [accessed 19 February 2022].). Movement Strategy conversations are held by Wikimedia Foundation staff, Wikimedia affiliates members and staff, as well as community members.
