LDC wrote

Andre wrote;

...

I wanted to see who is the most active contributor at the moment. To do so, I counted (or rather, had the database count) the numbers of edits per registered user.

I should point out that this only counts edits made since the installation of Magnus's Phase II software, so it somewhat undercounts those who contributed to the project in its early days, such as Larry Sanger, me, Tim Shell, Magnus, and probably a few others.

Yeah it would be nice to have /somebody/ who is even close to me :) (although adding the extra month would also add a couple hundred more edits to my total too). It should be noted that the majority of my edits are rather minor (minor NPOVing, minor adds, wikification and formatting mostly). I don't know how useful having a list of most active contributors would be though - our focus shouldn't be on number of edits but on the quality of individual articles (which really can't be measured by any SQL query).

There will always be people like me who feel they need to do grunt work to make the whole encyclopedia look and feel like a coherent whole. I would spend more time on fewer articles (I have a /huge/ backlog of notes and material to contribute) but since others are doing that so well I spend much of my time doing what many people don't like to do because it is boring or otherwise not fun. If this work gets largely done without me then I will switch to concentrating my contributions to fewer articles (something I've been wanting to do for some time now anyway -- there are /many/ areas in biology, chemistry and geology that need better coverage). In short, there are many different ways to contribute to Wikipedia and a list of most active users really only highlights Recent Changes junkies like me.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS to Andre; I'm not going anywhere but as my user page states I have had to significantly cut-back my contributions due to simultaneous full-time work and full-time school. In fact, I have been concentrating my contributions of late toward the element and orders of magnitude articles. Of course I still wikify, WikiFormat and check for copyright violations in many articles every other day or so. I'll be back into the full swing of things as soon as winter break arrives.

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