Dear all,
I am starting this thread in the hope that some of the great Wiki researchers on this list could advise me on a data collection problem.
Here is the question: for a each of 120 Wikipedia admins (for whom I have the usernames and unique numeric ids), I would like to reliably count the number of times they (i) deleted a page (ii) undeleted (i.e. restored) a page (iii) protected a page (iv) blocked
a user and (v) unblocked a user.
Those types of edits all correspond to a specific "action" in the Wikipedia API documentation page (
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php):
action=delete,
action=undelete,
action=protect,
action=block and
action=unblock.
I don't know, however, what would be the best strategy to go about collecting those edits. Does anyone have an idea about which data collection strategy I should adopt in this case? Is there a way to query the Wikipedia API directly, or should I look for some
specific markers in the edit summaries?
Thanks much for your attention and time. :)
Jérôme.