[Toolserver-l] Query Service Inquiry

[MZMcBride]

Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> What I need to do is, using that list of contributors, select the top 20 or so
> (excluding bots) for each of the hundred selected articles and get a list of
> all of the other articles to which each of them contributed with a frequency
> count of edits. Ideally, this data would be in a table of sorts for each
> article selected (so 100 tables).
> 
> This could, of course, be done manually by searching for contributions by
> username. however, this will be time consuming and possibly error prone. My
> hope was that a query could grab this information fairly quickly as well as
> automatically count frequencies of edits per article, etc.
> 
> I don't have the expertise to do this myself, but I do know someone who can
> and has requested an account. However, he is afraid he will not be granted an
> account for what will likely be a one time project.
> 
> Is there likely an API that can do what I described or would a query be an
> easier or more efficient way to go?

Yeah, user contributions are one of those things that are sometimes vastly
easier with the direct queries, as some users have thousands and thousands
of edits. This is obviously a problem for very few sites (mostly some
popular Wikimedia wikis), but for the wikis where it is a problem, it can
really slow things down to have to pull/aggregate so many edits. :-)

You can try filing a ticket in JIRA through the Query service. Alternately,
I recently made a page at Meta-Wiki (<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech>)
where you could try posting. I mostly set up the page because I felt trying
to get people to figure out JIRA, in addition to forcing them to articulate
what they actually want from the database, is too much. Plus it can act as
more of a forum/help desk than JIRA can.

Hope that helps,

MZMcBride