Page:Community Vital Signs Research Paper - Miquel Laniado Consonni.pdf/22

Sustainability 2022, 14, 4705

Figure 6. Vital sign: Balance. Evolution of the number of very active editors over the years, broken down by the lustrum of their first edit. An editor is considered very active in a given month if they have made at least 100 edits in that month; in the graph, data are accumulated by year so that each year includes all the editors who have been very active in at least a month of that year. The colors and percentages show the fraction of editors belonging to each generation (lustrum of the first edit) over the total number of very active editors each year.

4.2.4. Special Functions

In this section, we describe indicators for users with a special role in the community. We focus on technical editors and community coordinators. Each role will be described in the following sections. Most of the time, these roles are formally defined or recognized within Wikipedia, although we argue that they serve very important functions within the de facto governance of the project and are thus worth considering. A shortage of users that devote themselves to these special tasks poses a threat to the normal functioning of Wikipedia.

Very Active Technical Editors

Figure 7 shows the evolution of very active technical contributors, i.e., editors that contribute to namespaces Template and MediaWiki. Editors belonging to this group