📖 Developer Satisfaction 2024 Report

🔬 Research needs

tl;dr

Research audience knowledge – Only 29% knew that Wikimedia volunteer developers are one of the audiences served by the Wikimedia Foundation Research team.
Interest in collaboration – The majority of respondents would be interested in collaborating with members of the Wikimedia Research community.
Experience with research community initiatives – Most respondents had low levels of experience with Research team initiatives overall, but the majority of staff were familiar with office hours and the Wikimedia Research Showcase.

# Research audience knowledge

We asked survey takers, “Did you know that Wikimedia volunteer developers are one of the audiences served by the Wikimedia Foundation Research team?”

A majority of respondents (57.0%) said they did not know that Wikimedia volunteer developers are one of the audiences
29.1% said they did know
13.9% were unsure

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# Interest in collaboration

We asked survey takers, “As a Wikimedia developer, would you be interested in collaborating with members of the Wikimedia Research community?”

A majority of respondents (53.9%) said that they would be interested in collaborating
35.2% were unsure
10.9% said they were not interested in collaborating

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# Familiarity with Research projects

We asked survey takers, “Are you familiar with any of the projects led or supported by the Wikimedia Foundation Research team?” Respondents could select more than one project.

Respondents were most familiar with MinT: Machine in Translation platform (33.9%) and Link recommendation model (add-a-link) (32.3%).

Some researchers knew about Revert risk model (22.2%), Wikipedia_Preview (21.6%), Knowledge gaps index (15.8%), Clickstream dataset (15.8%), and Language-agnostic article topic model (14%).

And very few respondents knew about mwedittypes library (4.7%).

The project non-staff were most familiar with was the Link recommendation model (29.2%), followed by MinT (26%), Wikimedia Preview (21.9%), and the Revert risk model (20.8%).

Overall, staff were more familiar with Research projects than non-staff were. The project staff were most familiar with was MinT (47.1%), followed by the Link recommendation model (39.7%) and the Knowledge gaps index (30.9%).

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# Experience with research community initiatives

We asked survey takers, “What is your experience with the following initiatives driven by the Wikimedia Foundation Research team?” The initiatives were: Wiki Workshop, Wikimedia Research Fund, Wikimedia Research team office hours, and Wikimedia Research Showcases.

52% of respondents knew about Wikimedia Research Showcase
47% knew about Wikimedia Research team office hours
37% knew about the Wikimedia Research Fund
32% knew about Wiki Workshop

For all four initiatives, a higher percentage of staff reported participation than non-staff—especially the Wikimedia Research Showcases, for which 28% staff said they had participated and 10% of non-staff said they had participated.