📖 Developer Satisfaction 2023
The developer satisfaction survey is an annual survey of the Wikimedia developer community.
👥 Demographics
🔗 Roles
| # Role | Responses | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| WMF staff only | 61 | 45.9% |
| Volunteer only | 37 | 27.8% |
| WMF staff and volunteer | 18 | 13.5% |
| Affiliate staff only | 6 | 4.5% |
| Affiliate & volunteer | 6 | 4.5% |
| WMF staff, affiliate staff, and volunteer | 2 | 1.5% |
| Others (not WMF staff, nor volunteer, nor affiliate staff) | 3 | 2.3% |
| Grand Total | 133 | 100% |
As part of processing, we manually removed 65 responses where:
- The answers appeared to be non-good faith (e.g., all open-text responses were keysmash: lasdjflkdsa) (n=56)
- The respondent indicated that they are not a developer (n=9), or
- Survey responses were incomplete.
🔗 Functional roles
We asked survey takers, “What are your current functional role(s) in the Wikimedia developer community?”
Roles are not mutually exclusive. Respondents were able to select multiple functional roles.
| # Role | Responses | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| SRE infra | 13 | 10% |
| MediaWiki Core and MediaWiki Extension Developers | 12 | 9% |
| Gadget dev | 8 | 6% |
| MediaWiki Extension Developer | 7 | 5% |
| Other functional role | 6 | 4.5% |
| Service/API Developer | 5 | 4% |
| MediaWiki Extension, Tool, & Gadget Developers | 5 | 4% |
| MediaWiki Core, Extensions, & Tool Gadget Developers | 5 | 4% |
| MediaWiki Core, Extensions, & API Developers | 5 | 4% |
| Tool & Gadget Developers | 4 | 3% |
| Other combinations of roles | 63 | 47% |
| Grand Total | 133 | 100% |
🔗 Common role pairings
The most common role pairing was MediaWiki Extension developer + MediaWiki Core developer.
Additional common pairings included:
- tool developer + MediaWiki Extension developer,
- tool developer + gadget developer, and
- MediaWiki Extension developer + gadget developer.
🔗 Tenure
We asked survey takers, “For how many years have you been involved in the Wikimedia developer community in any role?”
The majority of respondents had 10 or fewer years of tenure.
About one fifth of respondents had 1 year of involvement or less.
🔗 Tenure×Functional roles
We compared functional roles between two tenure buckets:
- respondents with 0-3 years tenure
- respondents with 4+ years tenure
The group of respondents with 0-3 years tenure had higher percentages of gadget developers and data engineers.
The group of respondents with 4+ years tenure had higher percentages of MediaWiki Extension developers, MediaWiki Core developers, tool developers, SRE infrastructure developers, and test engineers.
Both groups had roughly the same percentage of respondents in each bucket indicated being Service/API developers.
🔗 Gender
Of those who answered the question:
- the majority (70%) identified as man or male
- 10.5% identified as woman or female
- 6% identified as nonbinary, genderqueer, and/or transgender
- 13% said they preferred not to provide their gender identity.
🔗 Language
We asked survey takers, “Is English your first or primary language?”
The majority of respondents indicated that English is not their first or primary language.
