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"
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.
_______________________________________________
Mediawiki-api mailing list
Mediawiki-api(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api