[Mediawiki-api] the meaning of registration and editcount

Hi everyone,

I have a question about two properties you can query about a user account: the "editcount" and the "registration". If you look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

for the *list=users* method, you see

editcount - adds the user's edit count registration - adds the user's registration timestamp

My naive interpretation is that editcount is the total number of edits made a given user (including the number of and registration is the time when the account was setup.) Therefore, if you use *list=usercontribs* method, two things should be true:

1) the editcount should be greater to or equal to the number of edits (usercontribs) for the given user I can get from the API. (As an ordinary user of the API, I won't be able to uncover deleted edits and therefore the editcount might exceed the count of edits from *list=usercontribs* )

and

2) the timestamp of all edits for a given user account cannot be earlier than the registration timestamp for that account. (That is, how can an account be editing before the account was actually registered.)

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Ka... yields:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <api> <query> <users> <user name="Katr67" editcount="4" registration="2010-12-10T08:09:19Z" /> </users> </query> </api>

But if you look at the list of contributions by User:Katr67 at

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&tagfilter=&title=Specia... -- you'll find more than 4 edits (contrary to assumption #1) and edits earlier than Dec 10 (contrary to assumption #2). From

http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Katr67&lang=en&...

we can see that there are 504 edits attributed to User:Katr67 (something one can verify through using

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Ka...

or mwclient -- e.g.:

len(list(mwclient.Site("en.wikipedia.org").usercontributions(user="Katr67"))) (which returned 504)

So, what do *editcount* and *registration* really mean then? (For User:Katr67, it looks like there was some change to the account on Dec 10, which reset the registration timestamp and editcount to the last 4 edits. )

Thanks, -Raymond (User:RaymondYee)