- Very active technical editors: the number of very active editors in technical namespaces, i.e., Mediawiki and Templates (Wikipedia contributors, ’Wikipedia:Namespace’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 25 January 2022, 02:37 UTC, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Namespace&oldid=1067769773 [accessed 19 February 2022]) broken down by year and by generation. Similarly, as with the previous measurement, here we focus on the very active technical editors who performed more than 100 edits in one month in technical namespaces (that is, templates and MediaWiki namespaces).
- Very active coordinators: the number of very active editors in coordination namespaces, i.e., Wikipedia and Help at least one month, broken down by year and by generation. In this other case, we repeat exactly the same analysis but considering only those very active editors who edit in the Help and Wikipedia namespaces (this is, Wikiprojects, Village Pump, among others). The number of editors for this second indicator tends to be higher. In the graph, we see the number of “Very active project coordinators”.
3.2.5. Administrators
RQ5 [Administrators] How are the Wikipedia language communities granting admin user rights (e.g., roles such as sysops) to new members?
The fifth vital sign is admins. Admins have rights and responsibilities in performing actions over the content and take a key function for the community. We propose three different indicators:
- Admins by year: number of admins by year of flag granted and by generation.
- Admins by lustrum: total number of active admins by generation at the current month.
- Admins ratio: ratio between the number of active admins and the number of active editors in a specific month.
3.2.6. Global participation
RQ6 [Global-Meta-wiki] How are Wikipedia language communities participating in global projects spaces (Meta)?
RQ7 [Global-Local] What is the composition of Wikipedia language communities in terms of multilingual editors?
The sixth and last vital sign is global. Participating in the “global community” (i.e., the Wikimedia Movement) is key for language communities to make their voice heard and learn from others. Complementarily, communities should also be able to attract members from other communities to edit. We propose two indicators based on the concept of primary editor, i.e., considering as an editor’s primary language edition the one in which they made more edits [39,43].
The two indicators are:
- Meta-wiki participation: ratio between the number of active editors in Meta-wiki that have as primary a given language edition and the number of active editors in that Wikipedia language edition during the same month.
- Primary language: this indicator aims at describing the composition of an editor community in terms of their primary language, looking at how many editors have this language edition as their primary one (primary editors), and for the remaining ones (non-primary editors), which is their primary language edition. Therefore, it consists in the distribution of the primary language edition of the editors contributing to a given language edition.
3.3. Code and Data
In order to compute the indicators for growth and renewal, we used the available data provided by the Wikimedia Foundation in the form of dumps (in particular, the Mediawiki History dump) (Mediawiki History Dump, Specifically, we downloaded the dumps that included all the history of interactions until November 2021. https://dumps.wikimedia.
