English: Measuring Arabic Wikipedia Community Health: Are We “Open” to Community Growth and Renewal?

Wikipedia has reached its second decade, being the largest multilingual and collaborative free knowledge repository in human history. Even though the project is undeniably successful along many dimensions - from worldwide popularity and geographical spread to its adoption even among professionals and academia - it has been unable to continue growing its editor communities, and community health is a recurring topic of debate among Wikipedians.

In this presentation, we introduce the project Community Health Metrics (CHM) aimed at measuring and understanding different aspects of community health, and we propose the creation of 7 indicators that we call Vital Signs. They are related to the community capacity and function to grow or renew itself. Three of them are focused on the entire group of “active editors” creating content: retention, stability, and balance; the other four are related to more specific community functions: flags, technical development, project documentation and coordination, and global community spaces. We believe that obtaining the current “active community capacities” in these areas can constitute a valuable reference point to plan to guarantee “openness” in these areas, and at the same time, to foresee and prevent future risks (e.g., bus factor).

These metrics are created by mining the available data dumps of Wikimedia projects’ editing histories. We will provide detailed results for the Arabic language including its dialects (Moroccan and Egyptian) along with some other Wikipedia language editions for comparison. We will try to answer questions such as: is the Arabic community able to retain more editors over time? Is Arabic Wikipedia balanced in terms of including new members over time and maintaining the old ones? Is the Arabic Wikipedia granting user rights (e.g., roles such as sysops) to new members?

There exist multiple initiatives aimed at improving the site editing experience, specially dedicated to newcomers, and to implement a Code of Conduct to provide a universal baseline of acceptable behaviour for the entire movement without tolerance for harassment. Then, why is it so difficult to implement them and start reverting the community decline in terms of number of active editors? Like other goals of paramount importance, achieving good community health depends on many aspects and is everyone’s responsibility.

After taking this quick look at the data, we want to invite you to spend some time discussing with us which actions we could design and implement as members of our communities and affiliates to work more effectively towards improving the presented indicators. We believe that by joining efforts at different levels (communities, affiliates and WMF), planning along with clear indicators on a short-mid term horizon, and by ensuring that we are implementing changes, we can become a more welcoming, dynamic, and productive community.