Wikipedia Editor Drop-Off A Framework to Characterize Editors’ Inactivity Marc Miquel-Ribé Cristian Consonni David Laniado Eurecat - Centre Tecnològic de Eurecat - Centre Tecnològic de Eurecat - Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya Catalunya Catalunya [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT spread to its adoption even among professionals and academia - it While there is extensive literature both on the motivations of has issues in being able to renew or grow its communities [3, 6]. Wikipedia’s editors and on newcomers’ retention, less is known In many Wikipedia language communities, the decline or stabi- about the process by which experienced editors leave. In this paper, lization in the number of editors was detected more than a decade we present an approach to characterize Wikipedia’s editor drop-off ago [3]. Despite dedicated interventions by the Wikimedia Foun- 1 2 3 as the transitional states from activity to inactivity. Our approach dation and other organizations, and groups of editors, it has 4 is based on the data that can be collected or inferred about editors’ not been possible to reverse this trend. While one can speculate activity within the project, namely their contributions to encyclope- whether the project is not as attractive to newcomers as in the dic articles, discussions with other editors, and overall participation. early days, we can observe that there are both language editions Along with the characterization, we want to advance three main and topics with very different levels of quality. Hill and Shaw[6] hypotheses, derived from the state of the art in the literature and the hint that a possible factor that is restraining Wikipedia’s growth is documentation produced by the community, to understand which the need to create, monitor, and maintain quality – including the interaction patterns may anticipate editors leaving Wikipedia: 1) management of tools and policies to counter vandalism and attacks abrupt interactions or conflict with other editors, 2) excess inthe caused by Wikipedia’s growing visibility. Thus, if newcomers are number and spread of interactions, and 3) a lack of interactions crucial to renew the communities, experienced editors are essential 5 with editors with similar characteristics. We present this work both to maintain the project. Any Wikipedian that is active in a partic- as a preliminary stage of our research to understand editor drop-off ular moment can become inactive, and, eventually, withdraw from and as a flexible frame to look at the phenomenon that we believe the project. can be useful in the future. Furthermore, by characterizing drop-off In this context, the risks associated with a declining community and identifying interaction patterns that may be associated with it, are especially relevant. Thus, understanding why and how editors it may be possible to assess the general health of a community, and leave Wikipedia has become an important question that has so far ultimately propose changes to improve it. received limited attention, not only to try and mitigate its causes, but also to foster the future of the encyclopedia. CCS CONCEPTS Previous research has described the relationship between par- ticipation and editor retention and, to a lesser extent, using tech- • Human-centered computing ! Empirical studies in col- niques from survival analysis, has depicted the contributor lifecy- laborative and social computing; Collaborative content cre- cle [18, 25]. While work on new editor retention focuses on editors ation. leaving in an initial period, often called the “onboarding phase”, reasons and dynamics may typically be different for users leaving KEYWORDS once having settled in the community and having undergone the Wikipedia, online communities, editor engagement, activity pat- learning process that becoming a community member entails [8]. terns, retiring, online collaboration In the rest of this paper, we first present in Section 2 the back- ground on editor drop-off that we collected from community essays ACM Reference Format: Marc Miquel-Ribé, Cristian Consonni, and David Laniado. 2021. Wikipedia on the subject. In Section 3, we present a framework to describe Editor Drop-Off: A Framework to Characterize Editors’ Inactivity. In Pro- different states of transition from activity to inactivity; rather than ceedings of Wiki Workshop 2021 at The Web Conference 2021 (Wiki Workshop asking Wikipedians to provide reasons for drop-off, we propose 2021). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn. nnnnnnn 1The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, located 1 INTRODUCTION in the United States, that supports and participates in the Wikimedia movement, owning the internet domain names of its projects and hosting its websites, including Wikipedia has reached its second decade being the largest mul- Wikipedia. One of the development teams at the WMF is dedicated to growth: https: tilingual and collaborative free knowledge repository in human //www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth. 2Local chapters and affiliate organizations of the Wikimedia Foundation have realized history. Even though the project is undeniably successful along projects focused on editor retention. For example, Wikimedia Hungary carried out many dimensions - from worldwide popularity and geographical one such project in 2019: https://w.wiki/337n. 3English Wikipedia editors’ efforts are coordinate in the Editor Retention WikiProject: https://w.wiki/337m. Wiki Workshop 2021, April 14, 2021, Lubiana, Slovenia (virtual event) 4https://stats.wikimedia.org 2021. 5https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Active_editor Wiki Workshop 2021, April 14, 2021, Lubiana, Slovenia (virtual event) Marc Miquel-Ribé, Cristian Consonni, and David Laniado a computational approach to characterize their activity and inter- for a procedure called “courtesy vanishing,12” which means having action patterns. In Section 4, we outline the main hypotheses that their username renamed and their userpages blanked or deleted, have been advanced in the state of the art to explain the phenome- while the contributions made to encyclopedic articles as well as non of drop-off. Finally, in Section 5, we discuss the next steps and user talk pages remain. This differentiates this procedure from what the implications of understanding editor drop-off. happens when a user leaves a social network and decides to “purge” We think of this work both as a preliminary stage of our research and delete all the submitted content [19]. to understand editor drop-off and as a flexible framework to look Semi-retiring (partial drop-off). A less radical option is semi- at the phenomenon that we believe can be useful in Wikipedia or retirement,13 which means becoming less active. Highly active any other collaborative project where contributions are tracked. Wikipedians commonly report that it is hard for them to take wik- 14 2 BACKGROUND ibreaks and find it challenging to stop editing at once. A semi- retired editor can pass from making thousands of edits per month The process by which an editor leaves Wikipedia presents a great to making just a few. variability in its motives and can lead to a partial or complete stop Similar to wikibreaks and retiring, editors can signal their status in editing. This process is also known on Wikipedia as retiring or by adding a “semi-retired” template to their userpage along with withdrawing from contribution. Even though a variety of external a message, so that other editors know that they can communicate 6 causes - even death - can influence the process by which editors with them, but they may not get a quick reply. With respect to the stop contribution, we limit the scope of this study to what we can other forms of editor drop-off, semi-retiring is the one that implies observe from the ensemble of events that happen on-wiki. a less drastic decision. We define drop-off as a user-driven voluntary choice to become inactive, thus excluding blocks or bans where a user loses their 3 CHARACTERIZING EDITOR DROP-OFF ability to contribute following a community decision. Being blocked “I like you when you do not edit, because it’s like you or even banned for a long period of time from a Wikimedia project are absent”15 implies the impossibility of participating, but it is not a drop-off. Instead, deciding not to return to editing after block7 or ban,8 or Following Neruda’s famous verse, we can assume an editor is even forcing a ban into what is known as “retirement by admin,9” absent when they are not editing, but it is harder to establish if they are different ways in which an editor can decide to withdraw from have left. Contrary to retention – where we can clearly define when Wikipedia. an editor has engaged after a given period of time and number of The three states of editor drop-off in their most common forms contributions – in our case it is always uncertain whether an editor are “wikibreaks,” “semi-retiring,” and “retiring.” has made a final decision to leave and will not return later. In fact, we can only look at templates added by a user to disclose 10 Wikibreak (temporary drop-off). A wikibreak or wiki-absence their status, or measure editor activity to infer it, but we cannot is a period during which an editor decides not to edit, although only be entirely certain. For defining active editors, a 5-edit per month temporarily. The community essay explaining the concept exists threshold is commonly considered, but being absent is more com- in 47 Wikipedia language editions, but the template a user adds plex, and cannot be captured by a one-size-fits-all metric. In the to their userpage to signal a wikibreak exists in 74 editions. The following subsection, we will present different metrics to assess template can be personalized with reasons such as “being busy,” both inactivity and decrease in activity.