English: 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’s 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 African Wikipedia language editions. We will try to answer questions such as: are the African community able to retain more editors over time? Are they balanced in terms of including new members over time and maintaining the old ones? Are they granting user rights (e.g., roles such as sysops) to new members? By answering these questions, we will reflect on the Wikimedia communities in Africa in order to try to aim at planning the necessary changes to aim at future growth.