Page:Community Vital Signs Research Paper - Miquel Laniado Consonni.pdf/29

Sustainability 2022, 14, 4705 Movement than the average editor and, given the small community size, their proportion is higher. In general terms, we see that the proportions tend to remain stable over time, which means that contributing to Meta-wiki is usually not an occasional activity, but a stable one.

[T14] Meta-wiki participation: As far as the targets, we see the number of editors from a Wikipedia language edition community active in Meta-wiki should be around 1% of the active editors. A much lower value would imply that the language edition community is not participating enough in the global movement. This should be calibrated on the size of the existing language community, for which we suggest a higher percentage, even if it can prove more challenging. Each community should have some user that act as ambassadors on Meta wiki.

Primary and Non-Primary Editors

Figure 11 reports for each Wikipedia language edition the percentage of primary and non-primary editors of that language. Arabic, English, German, and Polish have very high percentages of primary editors (>90%), instead for Swahili the percentage is only 54%. This lower percentage could be attributed to the fact that Swahili Wikipedia is a smaller and less established project. Lower percentages of primary editors are sometimes an indicator that an important part of the speakers of that language are editors of another Wikipedia edition, of a language that is also spoken in the area, or that they perceive as higher-status (e.g., this could be the case for English, which is spoken in several of the territories where Afrikaans and Swahili are spoken).



Figure 11. Vital sign: Primary and non-primary language editors. Percentage of editors of each Wikipedia language edition that are primary editors for that language (in grey) and that are primary editors in other languages. We do not report the full legend as it would cover a high number of languages. The six largest visible non-primary languages by order and color are: English (blue), German (purple), Spanish (green), French (yellow), Russian (pink), and Chinese (turquoise).

With respect to RQ7 [Global-Local], we see that Wikipedia language communities tend to be mainly composed by their primary editors, with a proportion ranging from 60% to 95%. The percentage of non-primary editors is usually higher when the language community is smaller. The primary language editions of non-primary editors tend to correspond to languages that are geographically or culturally close. There is also the special case of the non-primary editors who have as primary language English; this tends to happen in all the other language editions. We assume that some editors prefer editing in the English Wikipedia due to its global scope, to the point of making it their primary language, even though their native language is another one.