Page:Community Vital Signs Research Paper - Miquel Laniado Consonni.pdf/31

Sustainability 2022, 14, 4705 with only old-time editors. However, being balanced is a midterm goal. For this reason, given that the implicit goals are equivalent to the previous indicators, the actions for a balanced, productive community were not different from those planned for retention and stability.

Regarding two special community functions, technical contributors and coordinators were regarded as very important. The metric was designed to be consistent with balance, given that they could see the number of very active editors performing certain tasks on a yearly time-frame. Many affiliates expressed their concerns and lack of success in renewing the technical contributors, which seemed to be from much earlier generations than the overall community. They thought that planning “recruiting spaces” such as hackathons and leadership programs, events in general, could be a way to attract and provide the necessary skills for new or short-term involved editors to take technical or coordination responsibilities. On this vital sign, the affiliates totally agreed on their role and responsibility in taking this task.

Regarding administrators, the sessions’ participants were sometimes divided in their importance. Most of them considered that seeing indicators such as the number of administrators by their generation was a valuable way to understand the renewal, and that the number of administrators could grow in some cases. However, some participants considered that this was a sensitive debate, given the great commitment they take. In the debate, they considered that this is an affaire in which the Wikimedia Foundation has nothing to do, and that affiliates need to be cautious in only encouraging the debate within the community. Even though participants admitted that the lack of renewal in administrators could be seen as power concentration, discussing limits to the time involved and other ways to encourage renewal were not easy to implement.

Lastly, as far as the global participation indicators, participants found it interesting to see the participation in Meta-wiki as well as the proportion of non-primary editors in their languages; however, they did not consider it as relevant as the other vital signs. In the first case, they acknowledge the importance of being present in the global conversations and contribute to Meta-wiki with knowledge. However, they considered that the Wikimedia Foundation is the actor who needs to take a more active role in dynamizing these exchanges rather than the editors or the affiliate members. To improve the participation in Meta-wiki, affiliates’ recognized the importance of communication through the Wikimedia channels. The fact that English is mostly the de facto language of Meta-wiki was seen as a barrier to mitigate. In the second case, the proportion of non-primary editors among the active editors indicated a capacity of attraction of other languages’ editors, but also showed that some very small communities are even smaller since a considerable part of their active editors is not primarily committed to them. Tables 1 and 2 present a summary of all Vital Signs indicators together with the main findings of our assessment of the eight language communities we considered (Afrikaans, Arabic, Catalan, English, German, Italian, Polish, and Swahili) and the value we propose as targets to maintain a healthy community.