Page:Community Vital Signs Research Paper - Miquel Laniado Consonni.pdf/23

Sustainability 2022, 14, 4705 perform technical activities such as the creation and maintenance of templates, which are special pages that allow one to automate and standardize the way content is presented in Wikipedia articles, such as with infoboxes. It needs to be noted that this group comprises a much smaller number of the general population of very active editors; in fact, in most cases, even for established Wikipedia editions, this group comprises a few dozen editors. For example (in parentheses the number of very active technical editors versus the total very active editors): Catalan (15/268), German (59/3215), Italian (72/1556), and Polish (26/863). Only the English Wikipedia has a few hundred editors belonging to this group (657/17,341). In smaller projects the number of very technical editors can be very low; for the Afrikaans Wikipedia it is less than 5 and in the Swahili Wikipedia there have not been very active technical editors since 2014.

With respect to RQ4 [Special functions - technical editors], we see a general prominence of older generations, particularly the second generation (editors registered in 2006–2010). This pattern, already visible for active editors with RQ3, is even more marked for editors having special technical functions, pointing out a lack of renewal for this kind of profile. Community building on this group of contributors is highly encouraged. Given the scarcity of editors who engage in technical contributions, renewal and balance among generations are even more important. For this reason, it can be concerning that a community is overrelying on older editors, and it is not capable to attract technical editors from the younger generations, as in the case of Catalan.

[T6] Very active technical editors: We believe that having at least 20 users as a minimum number of “very active technical editors” seems desirable considering the different tasks (bots, templates, etc.).

[T7] Very active technical editors from the last generation: Given the usually low number of very active technical editors and the remarkable effort this role requires, it would be preferable that at least a consistent part of them were from newer generations; renewal is key. Therefore, we see a reasonable target of at least 30% very active technical editors from the last generation.

Very Active Coordinators

Figure 8 shows the evolution of the number of very active coordinators over the years. The metrics and the figure are similar to the previous one, with the difference that here the focus is on editors who are very active in the “Wikipedia” or “Help” namespace, instead of technical namespaces. Therefore, here we account for users who have an active role in coordinating projects and initiatives and can be essential for dynamizing the community.

We can see for most language editions a peak in the number of this kind of very active editors in rough correspondence with the growth peak in the initial phase, and then a general decrease until stabilizing around lower values. Furthermore, if we look at the composition of this group of users in terms of generations, we observe that again most of them tend to be from older generations; in particular, for most language editions, from the generation of users who registered between 2006 and 2010. An interesting exception is Arabic, a community that, as already observed above (e.g., in Figure 2) seems to be in another phase with respect to the other major language editions and still characterized by a growing pattern; therefore, it is not surprising that such somehow younger and growing community has a growing number of very active coordinators, especially from the last generation.