Hi Haifeng,
In my experience, this depends on how many users you're looking to get information about. Is it a few hundred? A few thousand? A million+?
If you are getting the edit history for a limited number of users (say a few hundred to a few thousand), then using the API can work well. One thing to keep in mind when using the API is that your requests might be throttled and/or there might be database lag. Are you using a software library to access the API? If not, I'd consider using one so that throttling/lag doesn't become an issue, it's one of the reasons why I use Pywikibot https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot for API requests.
If you're interested in querying a large number of users (say tens of thousands or more), then getting an account on Toolforge https://tools.wmflabs.org so you can run SQL queries against the replicated MediaWiki databases would make sense. I've frequently used that approach for data gathering for research purposes.
Hope that helps! And if not, don't hesitate to ask questions :)
Cheers, Morten
On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 at 07:22, Haifeng Zhang haifeng1@andrew.cmu.edu wrote:
Dear folks,
Is there a good way to query a user's edit history, e.g., edit count during a period?
My current solution is using usercontribs API ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Usercontribs).
But, the process has been stalled maybe due to some query limit.
Thanks,
Haifeng Zhang _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l