Utente:CristianCantoro/Sandbox/Midpoint report

• Team capacity: one of our team members, Pablo Aragón, stepped down to join the Wikimedia Research at WMF, and has become an advisor of the project. We incorporated Marc Miquel, who previously had the role of advisor, into the team. Marc will be actively working on the project until its completion. He has a strong experience in the context of editor engagement, specifically from his PhD dissertation.

• Coordination work: we were able to add to the team several dedicated and talented students, this meant dealing with some additional administrative work, on our institution and on the University side, and the coordination work required. We are convinced however that this extra effort is a worth investment for the project.

• Data: we have collected data from different sources and in different formats; it is not trivial to put all together in a comprehensive framework, we are working in this direction in order to be able to combine data and metrics. Furthermore, dealing with data from the projects is not always easy, as in many cases they are not structured or they change over time. For example, we have found a couple of bugs, which we have reported to Phabricator  (T276119, T276120).

• Limitations of quantitative methods: the fact that drop-off is often due to external reasons makes it harder to advance and test hypotheses only relying on on-wiki editor interaction data; to get insights on external vs internal reasons for drop-off with respect to the community, we have extracted templates for wikibreaks and retirement, and we plan to run interviews to members from different language communities.