Community Health Metrics/Drop-off Questionnaire

Report available here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Community_Health_-_Drop_off_Questionnaire_Report.pdf

Interview questions

We aim at obtaining opinions of selected Wikipedians with a long experience in the community or involved in community health matters. With the following questions, we would like to invite you to freely talk about community health, share your personal experiences, insights on how you perceive the current state of community health, as well as, considering possible causes for editor drop-off based on contemporary literature.

The questions can be administered to answer in a form or as in a scheduled live interview recorded and later transcribed (in this case, contact us). [CLOSED]

Introductory questions

• Could you tell us in a couple of sentences or three your involvement in the Wikimedia Movement?

• How do you feel about the community atmosphere right now? Do you think it is healthy and encourages growth? Do you think Wikipedia is a friendly place?

• When did you first start reflecting on community health?

• Where do you get information to understand community health? Do you think there is agreement on its current state?

Drop-off

• Do you think it is helpful to know when other Wikipedians take a break from being active or retire?

• Have you ever considered retiring? Have you spent periods in semi-retirement (decreasing the activity) or in inactivity (wiki-breaks)?

• Was it only due to external reasons, or also related to some community dynamics or interactions?

• Do you know when someone might be about to leave Wikipedia? How do you know?

• Have you noticed someone leaving because of or after explicitly saying that they cannot deal with a particular situation anymore?

Causes

• What are the situations that drain editors’ energy?

• What kinds of situations do you think are more demotivating for you and an average editor (e.g., receiving reverts, participating in heated discussions, editing controversial pages...)?

• Do you think there are specific profiles of editors (e.g., by gender) that tend to be more affected by this kind of situation?

• Have you seen any editor who has been blocked or questioned leave after that incident?

• And after a moment of “burnout” because of an excess of tasks? Do you want to describe it?

• Do you think some editors may be discouraged from editing because of a feeling of isolation? e.g., unable to interact with other editors with similar characteristics (registration time, gender, etc.)?

Solutions

• Which kind of actions do you think we are missing to improve community health?

• Are there any indicators about community and interaction dynamics that you think could be helpful to understand and improve the current state of community health (e.g., controversy indicators over time)?

• Do you think having more opportunities or paths to take responsibility/obtain user flags could encourage editors to stay longer on Wikipedia or participate more?

• Do you think there should be roles or spaces where editors could explain how they feel about the current atmosphere in the community?

Summary

Here we will show a summary of some valuable answers. We are currently receiving answers to the questionnaire.