On 2/26/07, Titoxd@Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From my experience, for every ten
Special:Contributions requests made, eight
or nine are just to find out the raw edit count, and the rest are used to
find namespace distributions, edit summary and minor edit usage. So,
displaying user_editcount on Special:Contributions will cause scrape
requests to take a substantial hit...
Doesn't any kind of edit count, with or without detailed statistics,
require exactly one request per page of contributions? You can't know
how many edits the person has without figuring out how many pages
there are, but that requires going through every page, which hopefully
you've used to scrape all of the contributions into some kind of
internal data structure, from which you can then divine whatever
statistics you want, no? Is it that statistics only care about the
last 1000 edits or whatever, so there's a limit on how many page
requests they'll need if not for wanting the full edit count?