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=K…
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=Speci…
-- 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&am…
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=K…
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)