After noting that I wanted to start congratulating new WordPress contributors on Twitter, Ozh Richard suggested I make a word cloud, as had been done in some previous releases.
So, based on a Trac report I made for demetris so he can compile the list of contributors, I generated these word clouds. These are based on changesets 12456 to 14319 (thus, as of this morning). Of 1864 commits, 677 of them had props given, for a total of 720 props (some commits had more than one). Patches were contributed by 170 people so far, the most ever (or so I’m told).
It was embarrassingly easy. I did a tab-delimited export of the report, grepped out what I didn’t want, and manually scanned the list for misspellings. Took me maybe 15 minutes on the flight to WordCamp San Francisco (I’m also in the air while posting this). Then I used Wordle for the cool visualization, and TagCrowd for the more functional one. (TagCrowd is also what Peter Westwood used in one of the clouds linked above.)
Frumph asked how a contributor is defined in this context, so let me do that. When the core team commits code, we mention the authors of the patch in the commit message by awarding “props,” such as “props nacin.” (You know, like giving “kudos.” Same deal.) We don’t give them to ourselves, but if there’s no props listed, then you can assume we wrote the code (or forgot the prop).
A disclaimer: These may not be accurate, with the reasons ranging from oddly formatted commit messages all the way to issues with my compiling.
Another disclaimer: Yes, I’m sorry my name is so big. I really am. I contributed a lot of code before becoming a committer, and this does actually exclude commits by the core team, including my own. (We made more than 1,000 commits on our own.) So my name is about six weeks from late December to early February. In 3.1, my name will be much smaller. 🙂
I’d hope this goes without saying, but props are not why I contribute to WordPress. I don’t keep a tally. This is just a cool visualization that shows the sheer breadth of the number of contributors, plus who some of the larger contributors are. Also, quantity does not equal quality.
Without further ado, the pretty Wordle:
And from TagCrowd (click for a much larger size):
