Regarding http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=rev&revision=41921
I congratulate the decision to make it off by default. However, I think we could code a better alternative (perhaps in addition to the edit counts, sine other mediawiki users may want them): instead of counting edits, let's count how many characters each user added or changed in the wikitext database.
Counting characters added or changed is much more indicative of the contributions of users than mere edit counts, although not perfect. It should be easy to code, considering that the software already counts it in diffs/rc (albeit also taking deletions into account).