Figure 12. Prototype dashboards for the Vital Signs website. Top: Retention in the English Wikipedia, including the number of registered editors by month (grey bars) and the retention rate (orange line). Bottom: Balance in the English Wikipedia, showing the number of very active editors by lustrum of their first edit (stacked bars).
6. Conclusions
We found that even when Wikipedia language communities are in stagnation or a slight decline, they renew a significant part of their most productive editors. This implies that communities are more sustainable than expected, and robust to a situation of sudden departure of tenured members. At the same time, the results show that, among the largest 50 communities in number of monthly active editors, only half of them exhibit a pattern of decline or stagnation. This also represents a significant breakthrough, given that it was widely assumed that communities were in decline for not being able to maintain their number of active editors [16]-possibly because of a focus on the English Wikipedia and other major language editions and a lack of analysis of smaller or younger communities.
Some authors found that when peer projects mature, it is usual that their policy structure and tools are optimized for content quality control, and this tends to imply the rejection of newcomers’ contributions [5,7,16]. However, other causes such as reverts [29] as well as the usability of the site [26] are also relevant to editor retention. While these factors are tackled by some projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, there is no specific coordination between the different Wikimedia Movement organizations (i.e., WMF and affiliates) to ensure that these actions revert the declining retention rate. At the same time, at community level, there are no processes set to revise the help pages and simplify their language, encourage interface improvement, or any other change that would demonstrably help newcomers survive the first days.
We believe that coordination between the organized and non-organized structures of the Wikimedia movement, i.e., on the one hand, Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia
