On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 5:19 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
You can try using the dumps, as Platonides suggested, or what I would do in this case is use the public API. Every Wikimedia wiki has one, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php. That allows you to easily get lists of the contributors to any page, which you can then aggregate and analyze.
Thank you for the information and feedback. What I need is somewhat more complicated than a list of contributors to a single page. In fact, there is already a tool in Wikipedia (just called contributors, I think) that lists all the contributors to an article and their number of edits. What I need to do is, using that list of contributors, select the top 20 or so (excluding bots) for each of the hundred selected articles and get a list of all of the other articles to which each of them contributed with a frequency count of edits. Ideally, this data would be in a table of sorts for each article selected (so 100 tables).
This could, of course, be done manually by searching for contributions by username. however, this will be time consuming and possibly error prone. My hope was that a query could grab this information fairly quickly as well as automatically count frequencies of edits per article, etc.
I don't have the expertise to do this myself, but I do know someone who can and has requested an account. However, he is afraid he will not be granted an account for what will likely be a one time project.
Is there likely an API that can do what I described or would a query be an easier or more efficient way to go?
Thanks again.