Page:Community Vital Signs Research Paper - Miquel Laniado Consonni.pdf/9

Sustainability 2022, 14, 4705 renewal, with the risks of a closed and not growing community. Therefore, it is the most valuable aspect to measure in terms of sustainability.


 * RQ3 [Balance] How balanced are Wikipedia communities in terms of including new members over time and maintaining the old ones?

2.3.4. Special Functions

Community special functions refer to those non-editing activities which are essential to growing the Wikipedia language edition, like, for instance, technical editors and coordinators. Technical editors are those who create the bots, the templates, and even do some changes to the platform. The bots are automatized users that have become an essential taskforce to perform massive changes and to clean undesired vandalized content [34–36].

As coordinators we consider those editors who develop tasks that do not directly relate to an article but to an entire topic or the project as a whole. They are editors who participate in the community discussions, create the Wikiprojects, and organize the lists of articles to be created or design the course of action to vote on a policy change or organize an event. They would act in Portal pages, which serve as spaces for broad subjects, or in Wikipedia pages, which tend to be dedicated to discussions or information about Wikipedia itself (e.g., policies, conventions, manual of style, etc.).


 * RQ4 [Special functions] How are Wikipedia communities renewing their technical development (Techwizard) and project specialists?

2.3.5. Administrators

Community administrators or, more generally, “user having special rights” refers to the community flags that are granted to editors to undertake some special functions. These flags allow special actions such as blocking an article or a user, deleting a page, and using certain automated tools. There are different types of flags that can be ordered by their level of rights [37] being “sysop” or “administrator” the most known among them (Wikipedia contributors, ’Wikipedia:Administrators’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 26 January 2022, 19:09 UTC, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators&oldid=1068121199 [accessed 19 February 2022]).

Administrators assume these responsibilities as volunteers and undergo a community review process based on their previous contributions and attitudes [38]. In many cases, editors obtain different flags over time and transition to higher ones [37]. Having an administrator flag implies a certain level of responsibility and commitment to some content quality patrolling activities, given that inactivity is punished with the removal of the flag. Administrators have some duties, but at the same time, they have some influence in any community matter.


 * RQ5 [Administrators] How are the Wikipedia communities granting admin user rights (e.g., roles such as sysops) to new members?

2.3.6. Global Participation

Global participation refers to the capacity of a Wikipedia language community to engage in global conversations and spaces usually held in Meta-wiki as well as to attract members from other communities while having a strong local base of contributors. To date, there is not any measurement on the composition of Meta-wiki contributors. However, it is assumed that it is representative of the movement, given that all the strategy conversations which are held on Meta-wiki pages decide on aspects that are incumbent on the whole Wikimedia movement.

As far as cross-wiki editing is concerned, Hale [39] found that multilingual editors exist in all language editions, but smaller-sized editions with fewer users have a higher percentage of multilingual people. However, what is unknown is the extent of editors in each Wikipedia language edition who do not have that language edition as their main project. This is important as it relates to the stability of the language edition, given that