Developer Satisfaction Survey/2024/Technical documentation
📖 Developer Satisfaction 2024 Report
🗂️ Technical documentation
edittl;dr
- Tools — Wikis are popular tools for documentation. 94% read docs on a wiki, at least occasionally. And the most popular place to read and write docs is on a wiki.
- Sites — The most popular sites for docs are MediaWiki.org and Wikitech. Only 28% use doc.wikimedia.org somewhat or very frequently, compared to 69% for wikis.
- Writing frequency — 34% of respondents write docs somewhat or very frequently.
# Reading documentation on wikis
We asked survey takers, “How often do you read technical documentation on a wiki?”
- A majority (69%) said they read technical documentation on a wiki very or somewhat frequently
- 25% said occasionally
- 3% said very infrequently or never
- 3% were unsure
We asked survey takers, “Please rank the following wikis by how often you use them to read technical documentation. Rank the following from 1 (most used) to 3 (least used)”.
They were asked to rank
- mediawiki.org
- wikitech.wikimedia.org
- meta.wikimedia.org
MediaWiki.org received the most #1 rankings and the highest mean rank. The wiki with the lowest number of #1 rankings and the lowest mean rank was meta.wikimedia.org.
# Reading documentation on doc.wikimedia.org
We asked survey takers, “How often do you read technical documentation on doc.wikimedia.org?”
- 50% said they infrequently or never* read technical documentation on doc.wikimedia.org
- 28% said they read documentation on the site very or somewhat frequently
- 19% said they read documentation on the site occasionally
- 3% were unsure
- *11% said they were not familiar with doc.wikimedia.org; this percentage has been included in the “Never” category
# Reading documentation preference
We asked survey takers, “Where do you prefer to read technical documentation? Rank the following from 1 (most preferred) to 4 (least preferred)”. “On a wiki” received the most #1 rankings.
# Writing documentation
We asked survey takers, “How often do you write technical documentation?” The most common answer was “occasionally”.
- 37% said they occasionally write documentation
- 34% said somewhat or very frequently
- 26% said very infrequently or never
- 3% were unsure
# Writing documentation preference
We asked survey takers, “Where do you prefer to write technical documentation?” Respondents could select more than one answer.
- 74.2% said “on a wiki”
- 63.2% said “in code comments”
- 48.4% said “in Markdown files in a code repository”
- 8.4% said “somewhere else”
