Thanks, Roan, Hercule, Brad, and Alex for your helpful responses.
To summarize, the following factors complicate my simple picture of how registration and editcount work:
1) usercontribs includes more events than recorded in editcount (such as renaming a page)
2) there may be history imports that bring in edits before the registration (or after) the registration date
3) sometimes user accounts are recreated even when they have been renamed.
4) there is a bug in which "users with large edit counts don't get re-attributed properly in the revision table" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17313
-Raymond
On 12/14/10 1:31 PM, Brad Jorsch wrote:
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 08:22:15AM +0100, Hercule wrote:
Editcount register the edits made by a user. And contributions are the lines of history with his name.
So, when I rename a page I make 1 edit, but create 2 lines if history (the one on redirect will be deleted if someone cancel my renaming.
Many log events that affect pages add a "dummy" revision, which can show up in the page history and the user's contribs but will not be included in editcount. AFAICT the only things that do increment editcount are actually editing a page and uploading a new file (but not overwriting an existing file).
Also, AFAICT editcount is never decremented. Not even if someone moves a page over a redirect you created, which does seem to completely delete the old revision for the redirect beyond any recovery.
A case when you can have history line anterior to your registration is on history import. And, as you didn't made the edit it is not in edit count.
I was going to suggest that too. It's even possible for a wiki to have edits attributed to a user account that doesn't exist due to imports.
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