WordPress 5.4 «Adderley» was released on March 31, 2020, and 552 people contributed to this version of our favorite web publishing tool! 🥂
As Documentation Coordinator, I can say that was an awesome experience and the release squad was extraordinarily professional and friendly. Shout out to the release squad and the mentors: Francesca, David, Sergey, Tammie, Mark, Mary, Jorge, Josepha, Jonathan, Jeff and Matt… thank you so much for this invaluable experience 🙌💚
When WP 5.3 was released, I made some statistics and rankings by country. For WordPress 5.4, I went further and you’ll find in this post much more statistics: contributions by country and by employer/company, as well as the ratio between new contributors and people who have already contributed to a previous release.
How those data were collected?
With Sergey Biryukov and Jorge Costa, we worked on putting props together in a spreadsheet to generate the credits list of WordPress 5.4. Then, I parsed WordPress.org profiles pages for each contributor to get some public informations about the contributors: country, employer, and wether they already contributed to WordPress Core or not. It includes both Core contributions on Trac and Gutenberg pull requests on GitHub.
Are those data fully accurate?
Those stats are based on what’s declared in each contributors’s wp.org profile. Users with empty profile informations are not taken into account.
All the charts and raw data can be downloaded below.
🌍Total Contributors (people) by Country
This chart shows the number of people who contributed to WordPress 5.4 sorted by country.
On the 48 countries who contributed to WordPress, United States has the biggest amount of contributors (99), followed by India (48 contributors). Next are Germany with 20, UK with 18 and France with 15 contributors.
Here is a Top-10’ comparison between WP 5.3 and WP 5.4:
| WordPress 5.3 | WordPress 5.4 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Country | People | Country | People |
| USA | 110 | USA | 99 |
| India | 63 | India | 48 |
| UK | 26 | Germany | 20 |
| Germany | 22 | UK | 18 |
| Netherlands | 21 | France | 15 |
| Australia | 14 | Canada | 11 |
| Canada | 13 | Netherlands | 11 |
| France | 11 | Bangladesh | 9 |
| Italy | 9 | Italy | 8 |
| Japan | 8 | Japan | 8 |
🌎Total Contributions (ticket credits) by Country
If we count all props credited (Trac tickets + GitHub issues), the results are considerably different. Russian contributors were credited in 558 tickets, just before Americans with 538 contributions, Dutch people with 168, British contributors with 114, people from India with 113 contributions and people from Algeria with 101 props.
Worth noting that Sergey Biryukov (WordPress 5.4 Core Tech lead) was credited in 555 Trac props! It explains why Russia is on the top. In fact, I’m not sure we released WordPress 5.4 or SergeyPress 1.0… 😂
💚Number of Core Contributors (people) by Employer
On the 163 companies that contributed to WordPress 5.4, Automattic has by far the biggest number of Core Contributors, with 52 employees credited in 5.4. Seven other companies have more than 2 employees credited: Yoast with 7 people, Whodunit – my employer – with 6 people, Human Made (6), 10up (5), Google (4), Bluehost (4), and WPMU Dev (3).
💜Total Core Contributions (ticket credits) by Employer
Automattic is the most prolific contributor with 754 tickets credited in WordPress 5.4, followed by Yoast with 601 props.
There is three other companies with more than 60 tickets credited: Bluehost (70), Whodunit (67) and Human Made (67).
🐣New contributors and regular contributors
I also tried to see what’s the ratio between new contributors and people who already contributed to a previous version of WordPress.
New contributors are one third of WordPress 5.4 contributors, with 168 people who did their first contribution to Core during this release! 🎉💚
They were credited in around 10% of the total amount of credits and regular contributors represent more than 90% of the whole. This is pretty normal, given newcomers are by definition experimenting core contribution 😌
People: new contributors VS regular contributors
Contributions: new contributors VS Regular
🎖Top WordPress 5.4 individual contributors
Here is the list of WordPress 5.4 contributors with more than 20 contributions:
| Username | Props | Country | Company |
|---|---|---|---|
| sergeybiryukov | 555 | Russia | Yoast |
| jorgefilipecosta | 144 | Automattic | |
| ellatrix | 135 | Netherlands | |
| youknowriad | 97 | Algeria | Automattic |
| aduth | 85 | United States | Automattic |
| epiqueras | 85 | Peru | |
| gziolo | 83 | Poland | Automattic |
| audrasjb | 60 | France | Whodunit |
| johnbillion | 52 | United Kingdom | Human Made Ltd |
| mkaz | 50 | United States | Automattic |
| desrosj | 42 | United States | Bluehost |
| garrett-eclipse | 42 | Canada | Eclipse360 |
| azaozz | 40 | Canada | |
| afercia | 36 | Italy | Yoast |
| joen | 32 | Denmark | Automattic |
| andraganescu | 31 | ||
| retrofox | 30 | Automattic | |
| talldanwp | 28 | Australia | |
| ianbelanger | 26 | United States | Bluehost |
| timothyblynjacobs | 26 | United States | iThemes |
| karmatosed | 26 | United Kingdom | Automattic |
| xkon | 24 | Greece | WPMU DEV |
| mcsf | 23 | Portugal | Automattic |
| whyisjake | 20 | United States | Automattic / WordPress VIP |
🎁Download charts & data
All those resources are shared under Creative Commons BY-SA, which means you are free to use it on your blog or website with proper attribution (and maybe a link to this page?).
If you want to support this initiative, you can buy me a beer 🍺 or leave a kind comment below 😍
 | WP 5.4 credits – Countries by people | Download PNG Download SVG |
 | WP 5.4 credits – Countries by contributions | Download PNG Download SVG |
 | WP 5.4 credits – Companies by people | Download PNG Download SVG |
 | WP 5.4 credits – Companies by contributions | Download PNG Download SVG |
 | WP 5.4 credits – newcomers vs regular contributors, by people | Download PNG Download SVG |
 | WP 5.4 credits – newcomers vs regular contributors, by contributions | Download PNG Download SVG |
 | WP 5.4 – Full Dump | Download CSV |