Hi there.
I am writing to see if someone could advise on a strategy to build a list of editors on
Wikipedia in Portuguese from 2001 to 2006. I am working on a piece to understand how the
Wikimedia community came to be in the Portuguese-speaking world and therefore want to
explore incentives for contributions before a stronger sense of community and shared
identity existed. This research is led by Flávia Varella (Theory of History Wiki
initiative, Federal University of Santa Catarina) and myself (Wiki Movimento Brasil,
Cásper Líbero School of Journalism).
Ideally, we would like to rank the list of editors based on their edit numbers. If
possible, we would gather other variables to have a sense of contributions back then,
i.e., bytes added on main space, talk pages etc. But this appears not to be so easy.
One strategy that was suggested to me was to look at the ptwiki dump. But the dump is huge
and would require major computational capacity to identify the period we are interested
in. One way out would be to find a place with a dump from 2006: is this something that
exists? Who might have access to older dumps? What other way(s) might exist to find the
data I am looking for?
I appreciate any help!
Cheers,
João (User:Joalpe)