Thanks, Roan, for responding to my post. It did occur to me I had hit upon an account renaming but I think something else is happening here. Let me give an example of an account renaming that seems to be the most common:
User:Penrithpanthers was renamed to User:SATidball -- which you can see at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=renameuser&am...
04:53, 3 December 2010Nihonjoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nihonjoe(talk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Nihonjoe |contribs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Nihonjoe)renamedUser:Penrithpanthers http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Penrithpanthers&action=edit&redlink=1to "SATidball" ?(94 edits. Reason: WP:CHU)
If we look up Penrithpanthers and SATidball in the API, using http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Pe... we get:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <api> <query> <users> <user name="Penrithpanthers" missing="" /> <user name="SATidball" editcount="96" registration="2010-09-25T00:30:16Z" gender="male" /> </users> </query> </api>
The old account name is now "missing" and the new account SATidball picks up the registration date and all the contributions that used to belong to Penrithpanthers.
What happened with User:Katr67 seems to be a bit different. We can find a renaming event for User:Katr67 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=renameuser&am... shows
03:31, 18 September 2010Nihonjoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nihonjoe(talk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Nihonjoe |contribs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Nihonjoe)renamedUser:Katr67 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Katr67to "Valfontis" ?(53,420 edits. Reason: WP:CHU)
However, the User:Katr67 account is not deleted (as was User:Penrithpanthers). Instead, going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Katr67 redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Valfontis And we look up both users at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Ka... we get
<?xml version="1.0"?> <api> <query> <users> <user name="Katr67" editcount="4" registration="2010-12-10T08:09:19Z" gender="unknown" /> <user name="Valfontis" editcount="53627" registration="2006-01-06T10:23:49Z" gender="unknown"> <groups> <g>autoreviewer</g> <g>reviewer</g> <g>rollbacker</g> </groups> </user> </users> </query> </api>
So what's happening with Katr67/Valfontis ?
Thanks, -Raymond (User:RaymondYee)
On 12/13/10 6:24 PM, Roan Kattouw wrote:
2010/12/14 Raymond Yeeraymond.yee@gmail.com:
In computing statistics for many recent accounts, I have these assumptions to be true for the vast majority of accounts. I'm puzzled, however, for accounts in which one or both assumptions are wrong. An example is User:Katr67
You probably hit an account rename here. Edits are reattributed for those, but I guess the editcount isn't updated for that, and of course the registration timestamp will be different too.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)