2008/10/10 nsk nsk@karastathis.org:
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).
That existing count is the change in the number of characters, not the number of characters changed. If you want to replace edit counts, you need the latter, since the former doesn't account for edits that just change existing text rather than adding or removing it.