Roan Kattouw wrote:
Ian Pye schreef:
Is it possible to retrieve the user_id of the user who made a given revision? I see that there is a ids element to rvprop, and a user element, but neither of these give me the user_id. Alternatively, is there a way I'm not seeing to map a user name to user_id?
Thanks for your help,
Ian
Other users' user IDs are more or less private, and shouldn't be available anywhere. You can get your own user ID through meta=userinfo or by going to Special:Preferences.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Are they? Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/Main_Page (and the XML dumps) - you can usually get the user ID from his user page this way, or any other page he has edited; also note that the Stewards can use the user IDs instead of the user names. I think it's better to have the user IDs public, to have a unique identifier of each user, and not to have problems with non-latin usernames. You can't do anything dangerous with the user ID (if you can, this is a bug which should be fixed, but I know no such bug).
P.S. This discussion should probably be in wikitech-l.