Volunteer software development recognition badges (Community Wishlist/W463)

Description

Just very few Community Wishlist issues ever get implemented. Many phabricator code issues (usually without wish) have been sitting for over a decade despite being important to implement. WMF spending for technical software development of core software like MediaWiki is arguably far below any reasonable level and not what the majority of funds are used for. In the 2022 Wishlist survey, many users called for at least 1% of the donated funds going toward the implementation of wishes.

Please boost volunteer motivation, incentives and recognition with badges for implementing code issues on phabricator (see Tech/News/Recently resolved community tasks) and wishes in the Wishlists (see Category:Community Wishlist Survey results).

Users could then

enable or add displaying these badges on their user pages and
could use these as a kind of 'certificates' for which they could get external reward such as by philanthropic donors seeing value in technical development (possibly even without disclosing their username or the issue worked on)
or external community recognition (volunteer work, arguably more impactful than a lot of things people do in various volunteer organizations or as part of a voluntary social year)
or set specific goals they want to achieve (gamification)
or by tech companies they'd like to get hired at (they could include it in the CV)
or other things (including things not possible now)

Importantly, please make it possible to see at least these two or the latter:

Number of total wishes and code issues implemented (here splitting and merging wishes may be good and displaying either a separate number of wishes and code issues or merging the two seems needed)
A number reasonably – even if often debatable especially early on – reflecting (trying to reflect) both difficulty of implementation and positive impact or importance – obviously changes like correcting a small typo in the code are different than contributing to the code implementation of dark mode or subreferencing or multiblocks or fixing a bug in the Commons Upload Wizard etc etc

Note that this could also be developed and done by volunteers so this isn't about a feature that only WMF can implement. Things can be improved over time as this gets adopted more widely and data is streamlined more to enable or improve this (e.g. using task priority + fetching number of code lines added/modified in the associated code patch) so as to for example also include software development on Wikimedia tools whose issues and code aren't tracked like e.g. MediaWiki's. Coding here again is about fetching the data, analyzing it for verification and for point 2 above, enabling display of the badges, and making the data available / well-readable by the software.

I have further ideas how the problem of too little too slow software development could be changed more substantially even without spending any extra WMF funds if WMF doesn't want to spend more on that end and may submit these as a separate wish. This wish is about the lack of badges, which are common for contributions to other sites like reddit (e.g. certain number of early upvoted comments in a subreddit) and Stack Exchange (e.g. certain number of answers marked as being the solution to a question) sites.

The two main target outcomes here are existing open source developers implementing more code issues and wishes, and getting more open source developers to join development of Wikimedia-projects-related software like especially MediaWiki.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

Feature request