[Mediawiki-api] the meaning of registration and editcount

[Raymond Yee]

Hi everyone,

I have a question about two properties you can query about a user 
account:  the "editcount" and the "registration".  If you look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

for the *list=users* method, you see

                     editcount    - adds the user's edit count
                     registration - adds the user's registration timestamp


My naive interpretation is that editcount is the total number of edits 
made a given user (including the number of  and registration is the time 
when the account was setup.)  Therefore,
if you use *list=usercontribs* method, two things should be true:

1) the editcount should be greater to or equal to the number of edits 
(usercontribs) for the given user I can get from the API. (As an 
ordinary user of the API, I won't be able to
uncover deleted edits and therefore the editcount might exceed the count 
of edits from *list=usercontribs* )

and

2) the timestamp of all edits for a given user account cannot be earlier 
than the registration timestamp for that account.  (That is, how can an 
account be editing before the account was actually registered.)

In computing statistics for many recent accounts, I have these 
assumptions to be true for the vast majority of accounts.  I'm puzzled, 
however, for accounts in which one or both assumptions are wrong.  An 
example is User:Katr67

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Katr67&usprop=editcount|registration  
yields:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
  <query>
    <users>
      <user name="Katr67" editcount="4" registration="2010-12-10T08:09:19Z" />
    </users>
  </query>
</api>

But if you look at the list of contributions by User:Katr67 at

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&tagfilter=&title=Special:Contributions&contribs=user&target=Katr67&namespace=&tagfilter=&year=&month=-1 
-- you'll find more than 4
edits (contrary to assumption #1) and edits earlier than Dec 10 
(contrary to assumption #2).  From

http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Katr67&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia

we can see that there are 504 edits attributed to User:Katr67 (something 
one can verify through using

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Katr67&usprop=editcount|registration

or  mwclient -- e.g.:

len(list(mwclient.Site("en.wikipedia.org").usercontributions(user="Katr67")))   
(which returned 504)

So, what do *editcount* and *registration* really mean then?  (For 
User:Katr67, it looks like there was some change to the account on Dec 
10, which reset the registration timestamp and editcount to the last 4 
edits. )

Thanks,
-Raymond (User:RaymondYee)


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