I don't know of any web-based tool, but it seems simple enough to write. But for now, scripting or no? This can be done through the API, it just takes a single query if if the number of edits is less than 500 (or 5000 if you're a registered bot or admin). If it is more, you need to call the API again and pass a 'continue' parameter to get the rest of the results, which most of the bot frameworks and API implementations automatically support. The basic query is: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=usercontribs&uc… If you're retrieving it by a script, it should return an array of all the edits, which you can easily count. Though you don't need to write a script to count the number of edits -- you could just copy/paste the API results from a web browser into Excel or OpenOffice Calc and it will treat each new line as a new row, so just look at the number of the last row. By the way, if you haven't used it, the API is pretty awesome once you get the hang of it (docs at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API), and I pass parameters to it from a web browser all the time. The copy/paste trick also works if you go to Special:Contributions and manually select, copy, and paste a list of edits. Before I got into the world of APIs and scripting, I did this far too often for my own good. You can select a Month/Year in the interface to begin listing edits and a direction to go in (earlier or later), but there is no end date. And FYI, you can edit the "&limit" parameter in the URL to get a max of 5,000 edits per page, and set the "&offset" parameter to more finely control the date/time. If you have more the 5,000 edits, you can use the interface to count off blocks of 5,000s, and then copy/paste to Excel for the remainder. Stuart On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Andrea Forte <andrea.forte(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 22 Mar 2011, fox wrote: I was confused there for a bit. The API also returns JSON with format=json. To me the Wikipedia API seems reasonably responsive in Andrea's case (with edits < 500). Here is a Python script for Geiger's URL: Regards Finn ___________________________________________________________________ Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, Denmark Lundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/ http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/ ___________________________________________________________________

Hi. Andrea, probably you will also like the new Soxred93's tools on toolserver :) http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/ "Edit Summary calculator" quickly answers your question (including simple barplot, no legend available but I guess it represents major [green] and minor [red] edits): http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/editsummary/ http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/editsummary/index.php?name=Andicat&lang… Besides, you can also get nice overall stats (including graphs) with Edit counts: http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/ec http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Andicat&lang=en&a… Then, you can also enable month counts and top edited pages stats. Just opt in following the instructions at the bottom of results, to create a special page (or activate it across al wikis). Hope this helps. Felipe. ----- Mensaje original ---- De: Andrea Forte &lt;andrea.forte(a)gmail.com&gt; Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Enviado: mar,22 marzo, 2011 21:47 Asunto: [Wiki-research-l] edit counts for specific users Hi all - I have poked around on toolserver but I don't seem to see a tool that generates a list/count of user edits for a particular date range. Does anyone know if such a tool exists? i.e.: Show me andicat's edits/stats for july 2005 through september 2007. (Unless I missed something, none of these do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_edit_counters) -andrea -- :: Andrea Forte :: Assistant Professor :: College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University :: http://www.andreaforte.net _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Hi, Please take care to stay within the policy stated at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy - if you are researching in general there is no issue but if you are analysing/data mining a specific editor's contributions it should be for a recognized bureaucratic purpose. Cheers, Fæ -- http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae

Hmm, it seems that soxred93's tools require opt-in... all the users I've tried to look up come back "non-existent." Bummer. :) Just a note - I spoke at Wikimania in Gdansk about research ethics. The privacy policy is actually less stringent than the code of ethics that researchers generally adhere to. In all my work, I strive to respect and protect the well-being of my participants. I think this should be the norm for anyone doing research that involves people! (Also, I remember Fernanda's talk well, I was the trouble maker in the audience who asked her about whether the users they showcased had given consent ;)) Andrea On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 8:46 AM, Erik Zachte &lt;erikzachte(a)infodisiac.com&gt; wrote: --  :: Andrea Forte  :: Assistant Professor  :: College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University  :: http://www.andreaforte.net

On 23 Mar 2011, at 20:46, Erik Zachte wrote: Or to view privately, to understand his/her own editing history. I'd be very interested in using such a tool in that way. Regarding ethics, and adding to Andrea's email, the ACM code of ethics may give a useful idea: http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics Many other professional societies have similar codes. -Jodi

it would be wise to make such tools opt-in. That makes all the difference. I’d also love to see such viz. for my own edits and probably wouldn’t mind sharing it. And I’m not arguing against mining these data for research. I trust that research will focus on generalized findings, and in an article will provide an example for which consent had been given. My point is rather that if we provide generic tools as a service to the research community the issue of opt-in will sooner or later become mute. Someone will take the tool, add the category cloud, and start wikigossip.com (just checked: domain is reserved) I know this is a general trend anyway, lots of tools already exist that help you analyze someone’s presence on the web. me) that really want more insight into the rich data set of our editing histories. On an aggregate level or secure access level, yes. Not to feed our interpersonal curiosity. I’m sure no-one here has that in mind and of course I wasn’t implicating such. Just raising awareness of what it could lead to. Erik Zachte From: Steven Walling [mailto:steven.walling@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2011 18:30 To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Cc: Erik Zachte; aforte(a)gatech.edu Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] edit counts for specific users On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 5:46 AM, Erik Zachte &lt;erikzachte(a)infodisiac.com&gt; wrote: In Wikimania Boston, 2006, visualization experts [1] Fernanda Viégas en Martin Wattenberg presented a tool which could produce a tag cloud from a person's edit history. Tag clouds were a novelty and very suitable for the matter at hand. You could see at a glance that editor Johanna Doe was mainly engaged in articles about say classic music, and Chinese and Iran politics, which is OK of course, but maybe better left to the person to disclose at her own discretion. We discussed implications of the visualization: on one hand this was all data from the public dumps, and anyone could make such a script once the idea spread, on the other hand would it be wise to help facilitate this process. I later found out they decided not to publish the tool for this very reason. [1] See first two entries on http://infodisiac.com/Wikimedia/Visualizations/ Erik Zachte That is really sad. As a Wikipedian, I would hate to see any researcher shy away from publishing interesting and insightful visualizations of public data. If you're producing analyses that call out individual editors, then yes, it would be wise to make such tools opt-in. But for every Wikipedian who would rather not, there are ten more (like me) that really want more insight into the rich data set of our editing histories. Steven