Wikipedia talk:WikiProject edit counters/Archive 1

Scope?
Is the project just for edit counters, or other things too? I'd like to keep track of tools people write like: On the other hand, there's already Toolserver/Projects and wikitech-l and #wikimedia-toolserver. *shrug* --Interiot 01:37, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
 * category-wide recent changes (that would be soooo nice to have)
 * user pages, sorted by number of userboxes on them
 * admin counts (or other queries that take a long time to run, but are updated weekly/monthly, and are useful)
 * estimated time of user account creation (one of mine, but IMHO another example of little obscure things that can be useful)
 * Well, admin counts would definitely fall into edit analysis, so they're in our scope (and I thought Kate was updating them daily?), as the estimated time of account creation does. So, those two belong here very well. I'm not sure how we can control the category-wide RC feeds (as it seems that they have to do with a feature that has to be activated on LocalSettings.php first, unless I'm understanding something wrong). As for the Userboxes... well, I hadn't thought of that, and we can surely keep links to other "Interesting Tools" below our main projects. :)
 * 972 userboxes??? Tito xd (?!? - help us) 01:58, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Another useful link: Tito xd (?!?) 07:46, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Interesting tool
I stumbled upon this tool, and I thought it was interesting... just a thought. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 04:09, 18 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Hey, I'm the one that brought that up in IRC just now. ;)


 * And that's kind of what I was talking about scope... I think there's a bunch of tools that different people are putting together, I think there should be a greater general awareness of them, not necessarily so people work together, just because they're out there, and if a developer starts writing a new tool, they'd really rather know whether their idea is already implemented or not. --Interiot 04:11, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

en.wikipedia.org data is no longer updated
How about just a tad more detail? Perhaps an explanation? Rfrisbietalk 02:36, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I tried to elaborate a little bit - if I understand correctly, the toolserver needs to replicate data from the main servers, and the replication with en.wikipedia.org is no longer occuring, so new edits are not showing up on the toolserver. --AySz88^ - ^ 02:49, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * That's my understanding as well: that edits from a certain point (a few days ago) will no longer be updated; thus, the counter will stay outdated. See User talk:Interiot, where he addresses the issue. The developers are working on fixing this, so hopefully the problem will be rectified soon. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note? ) 14:30, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification, unfortunate as it may be. :-( Good luck with the related projects! :-) Rfrisbietalk 15:31, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Toolserver Back up?
Woa, I just clicked on someone's count expecting to see old outdated data, but instead I found data replicated only mere seconds ago!!! Is the toolserver back up for good now, or is this a bug? AmiDaniel (Talk) 23:45, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
 * The toolserver by itself is back up, but the database is lagged about 6 days, and it is corrupt after April 12. See Interiot's talk for more details. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 23:47, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Ahh, I was just coming back to comment that the data wasn't nearly accurate... by corrupt, I assume you mean it's unsalvagable, and the count for older users will always be incorrect? In any case it's certainly a major improvement. Even if the data is wrong I don't have to wait 500 hours to get it :-). AmiDaniel (Talk)
 * It won't always be incorrect, hopefully it will be fixed sooner or later. It's definitely incorrect for the time being though.  Sadly, DaBpunkt says he's stumped by the problem.  --Interiot 23:51, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Use sourceforge for code storage?
Apologies if this has been discussed before. Has any thought been given to moving this to a service like Sourceforge.net or similar? Having the code under source code control would make it easier for multiple editors to contribute and to keep track of updates. Cut and paste from a web page is a little old school :-) Gw e rnol 04:44, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, we have gotten a SourceForge account. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 05:00, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Hmm
I have noticed that Kate and Interiot's tools are working again, (albeit slowly) what changed? H ig hway Rainbow Sneakers 17:39, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
 * DaBpunkt put a possible fix in... however, some of the new data is corrupt, and the edit counts from the toolserver should not be relied upon.  --Interiot 18:09, 29 May 2006 (UTC)


 * For me, for instance, the data on the toolserver version has given me edits I didn't make as well as not counted others. Some I didn't make that are counted: Protein array analysis (20 edits!); Thomas, Owen (again, 9 edits!); Nazo; Nasir ibn Khosrau; Adams Township, Coshocton County, OH (I don't even live in Ohio!), etcetera. When it did work, however, it was nice to be able to see summaries within each namespace as well, though. – Xolatron 18:17, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Counting Bytes
Is there any tool that counts a user's contributions in bytes?

This strikes me as relatively fair, as minor edits will produce few bytes. Also, users, who prepare new articles in their own user namespace and then need only one edit to put them into article space are credited accordingly. It doesn't matter how many edits one uses in order to produce, say, 1000 bytes of relevant contributions. How do I know all 1000 bytes are relevant? Well, deleted pages would not be counted and if it's not deleted, then chances are it's at least useful. I know there's still large differences in quality between these bytes and those. But I still think Number of Bytes is much better than Number of Edits. -- ulim, 16:20, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually, it may not be hugely computationally expensive to get a (#bytes after edit)-(#bytes before edit) from the toolserver, as the toolserver knows the size of each revision (though it still might take 10+ minutes per user). On the other hand, the Levenshtein distance is more accurate as it includes substitutions as well as adds/deletes, but that would be fairly expensive, and still wouldn't take into account edits that get reverted ASAP.  But maybe if someone has spare time with a database dump, maybe they could try it for a few RFAs...  (also, deleting shouldn't really count for anything, I suppose?  Reverting a copyvio is sort of apples and oranges with adding lots of original content)  --Interiot 17:02, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
 * The Levenshtein distance is interesting, as it tells us how many bytes the author should have used :) But what I meant is that the histories of deleted pages would simply not be counted - only articles existing today in Wikipedia would be processed. This way a user's bytecount could actually decrease over time.


 * About reverting vandalism: if (#bytes after edit)-(#bytes before edit) is negative, then I would neither add nor subtract these bytes from the user's bytecount, but instead just count this as one "QA Edit". A user's contributions would then be measured by number of bytes added to articles and number of QA edits performed. Is it possible to acquire a (smallish) DB dump for testing out this idea? And what is an RFA? -- ulim, 23:05, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Status
What's the ETA on edit counters working again? I guess I never understood why they didn't work in the first place. --Liface 02:16, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * For toolserver counters, the status should be at Toolserver/news. Currently, I believe we're just waiting for a new hard drive to be installed on the toolserver, and then replication can start up again.  --Interiot 03:10, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Another edit counter
I decided to write my own edit counter, due to the toolserver problems and the fact that Interiot's Tool2 apparently doesn't work in IE (I haven't tried...) It's an HTML-scraper that runs as a monobook.js script, and so is only useful for Monobook users. It's still under development at the moment, and any feedback would be welcome. --ais523 12:24, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Some random thoughts on edit counters...
 * The main reason that I wrote Tool2 was that it was difficult to block (it was written shortly after my Tool1 IP was blocked). Tool2 has no single IP / useragent that can be blocked, and while the page must be located on-wiki due to Javascript security restrictions, any user can install it at any location, so deleting one of its pages doesn't necessarily cause it to become unavailable.  (though the IP was only blocked after the toolserver came back up, and external counters mostly haven't been blocked while enwiki replication has been down, so this isn't really an advantage)
 * Another advantage is that javascript scrapers are also potentially easier to set up on third-party mediawiki servers (eg. server owners don't have to get a CGI script working, they don't have to worry about module dependencies, ...). From a practical standpoint though, I've found it difficult to make javascript counters work on other servers, especially onces with different date formats (though there are lots of little issues too, like the URLs that the tool can be accessed by are different).
 * Basically, as long as the developers seem to be okay with letting external scrapers run on other websites while enwiki replication is down (as CGI, eg. Essjay's tool), then I think that's the most user-friendly type of edit counter (eg. users don't have to do an extra setup step... users don't have to hit "yes, keep running" over and over for high-edit users).  So I don't think it's useful for me to maintain Tool2, and users should probably use Essjay's instead (or ais523's, if it's relatively easy to use).  --Interiot 06:16, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, the only reason we require the "confirm" prompt is to stop users from abusing Flcelloguy's tool to spam the server... however, it is *easily* disabled. The only thing we would like is to know if Wikimedia developers wouldn't mind, or if they're able to rangeblock particular instances of a user without disabling the tool outright. So... what does everyone else think about this? Tito xd (?!?) 06:26, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
 * In the case of Tool1, they blocked one specific IP at the squid proxy... I imagine if there's only one user abusing it, at one IP, they might do that.
 * Anyway, I think that users will use whatever is the most user-friendly, and right now, I think that's a CGI/web-based HTML scraper. --Interiot 06:37, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
 * We could probably make it a global configuration setting, so we'll do that in the next maintenance release. If someone is annoying the heck out of the servers, we can turn it on again immediately, and it will take effect in at most 10 minutes. I've been trying to wonder if I can port the editcounter to PHP to include in MediaWiki, so that would be even more convinient too... Tito xd (?!?) 06:41, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Question
Is there any way to get a list of all editors, sorted by edit count or by date of account creation? I know I've seen such a list before, but that might have been in the toolserver days. Herostratus 01:44, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
 * "The toolserver days" :) I guess it seems like an epoch since it was up.  There's List of Wikipedians by number of edits, and it lists the queries they run, I believe.  --Interiot 02:00, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Deleted edits
On the old Kate's tool, it displayed how many deleted edits a user had, as well as how many "actual" edits they had. Is there a way to see this information now? Thanks Batmanand | Talk 18:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Once the toolserver starts replicating enwiki, you'll be able to see the deleted count again. There's currently no way to display a deleted count otherwise.  However, you could request that query.php add the ability to simply count deleted edits, and it's somewhat likely that would be implemented.  --Interiot 18:35, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Merge with Edit count
I am removing the Merge request as it has been there since May and has not been merged nor no discussion of merging has taken place. Furthermore Edit Counters and Edit Counts are two distinctly different articles. One article pertains to Edit Counters as a tool, Wikipedia Project, details of changes and advancement relating to that specific project and Edit Counts refers to simply the alteration of a thing and how Wikipedia sorts and tracks. Mkdw 20:55, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * This isn't really all that much of a cooperative project (though it is a bit, especially with Flcelloguy's). It's more of a dumping ground for all things related to edit counters (for instance, Kate's Tool has been merged here).  The list of edit counters on the other page obviously needed to be merged here, I've done that.  I've copied the description at that page here too, just to try it out.  There are several other edit-count related pages (eg. Editcountitis) that are longish, I'm not sure whether we'd consider merging them as well. --Interiot 21:32, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Similiarities are not grounds for merging. Kate's Tools were merged here because this article is about Edit Counters and her tools are that. Edit Counts as an encyclopedic article have nothing to do with tools or edit counters. It's simple a descriptive article that details Edit Counts and its relationship to Wikipedia. Furthermore as a creater of edit counters, you are not sticking to a NPOV about the dissimiliarities between the two subjects. The request is 6 months old and with out a single vote to have them merged opposed to the 5 or 6 votes to have them kept separate. It should also be mentioned that under the Edit Count article in the Encyclopedia, you should not be including links to your own tools you have created as those should only be included in the article about Edit Counters. Your tools have very little to do with Edit Counts and their functions and original creation in Wikipedia. Both articles need cleaning up and more separation rather than merging them as their fundamental ideas are completely different. Mkdw 22:06, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I still don't see why you would want to have two lists of editcounters, though, so I've removed that list from Edit count and pointed towards here. Tito xd (?!?) 22:10, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

I feel that the NPOV of separating articles has been slanted in this argument and I will leave this to the workings of others. I will mention that in the beginning of this article has a copy and pasted section for Edit_count. The article itself is Edit Counters. The Wikipedia Project about Edit Counters should describe the development, improvement, and collaborative work on Edit Counters for Wikipedia and Edit Counts as an encyclopedic article should describe the usages of Edit Counts with in Wikipedia and origins etc. The articles are similar but have very different concepts once you read down to the articles and realize that they need cleaning up as information is being shared between them that is irrevelant to the topic.

"Edit counts are a quick way of measuring a Wikipedian's experience in the Wikipedia community. Certain tasks require that a Wikipedian has a certain number of edits, e.g., voting on Articles for deletion. Moreover, some users base their Request for adminship votes on several factors, including edit counts. Edit counts can also be used to view past edits and deleted edits. As edits can vary greatly in size and quality, it is important not to put too much weight into edit count, and to avoid worrying too much about one's own edit count. Edit counts do not necessarily reflect the value of a user's contributions to the Wikipedia project, but they are however very important in requests for adminship (RfA) as many voters' votes are based on the number of edits a user has made."

Should be removed from this article as it has nothing to do with the topic "Edit Counters" (tools). The section paragraph:

"Welcome to the WikiProject for tools and edit counters. Our goal is to organize and coordinate the various efforts at creating edit counters and statistics tools. Our primary purpose is to give Wikipedians more tools at analyzing their own edits and others' edits; while editcountitis may be fatal, we primarily strive to offer another alternative and viewpoint at one's contributions. We're not promoting the use of statistics to judge someone's appropriateness or suitability for any positions; quite the contrary. We're just getting started. Please feel free to join and help us."

Describes clearly the purpose of the article and should be kept to that. I hope someone outside of this project comes to moderate this transition as I notice most of the confusion about separating the articles is only being moderated by people with in the project. Sometimes taking an outside approach will remind us of the standards of english, referencing, and policy that is applicable in this situation. Thank you.

Mkdw 22:26, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * From WP:NPOV:
 * Neutral point of view, is one of Wikipedia's three content policies. The other two are Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:No original research. Jointly, these policies determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in the main namespace.
 * This isn't in the main namespace. NPOV doesn't apply here at all. Or any content guideline, for that matter. Tito xd (?!?) 22:31, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Well actually a Neutral Point of View does not refer to a Wikipedia policy. Wikipedia does have a policy about NPOV on its encyclopedic section, but the concept of point of view has existed for a long time outside of Wikipedia. Its defined by The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: an unbiased manner of viewing things; an attitude. I am not requesting that it be reviewed under Wikipedia's policy, that this argument is being stemmed by people working on the tools instead of looking at its practical use with in the Wikipedia website for all users. Point of view here has a lot of grounds. For example its why there still exists a discussion page over the project page and why irrelevent information is removed, etc. etc. A breach of this POV in my opinion, another POV, and has now been corrected, the linking of various people's edit counters on the Edit Count page opposed to the Edit Counters project page. Mkdw 22:45, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * This page doesn't even deal with edit counters in an academic tone, nor is trying to do so. It's just a central point of coordination of editors who are trying to do something, what we call a WikiProject. Tito xd (?!?) 22:48, 22 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I never said it has to do with an academic tone. You simply have two articles and on one article it has two thesis statements saying very different things and telling you have two different purposes for the article. You then have two different articles and the idea of merging them seems incomprehensible and illogical. One about tool development and the other about the purpose and fuction of edit counts as a number being use in Wikipedia (specifically adminship). Mkdw 22:53, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * This page is not an article. That's the fundamental disagreement. There's no thesis statements, fundamental positions, arguments, or anything else that can be remotely construed as an article. The only reason this argument exists is because Interiot tried adding a bit of background information about edit counts to the page. I'm afraid that we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Tito xd (?!?) 23:02, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I mentioned NPOV is that the topics are different, it's clear: different discussions, different topics, different purposes as Wikiproject pages, but the merge request has been rejected continuously by users outside of the project, and the merger request is coming from people with in the project and there is no reasoning to merge them other than that up until today the two articles were also being partly used to promote edit counting tools. Mkdw 22:59, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The only thing that was merged was the duplicate list that had no reason for being on Edit count, except that it had been there since anyone of us was here, and no one had bothered to remove it. Tito xd (?!?) 23:02, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Everything has room for improvement. Many of the Wikipedia pages and project pages are outdated and even in some cases have a lot of spelling and gramatical corrections needed. For the ease of its users and readers. Now seems like a good time to review the purpose of this page and remove redundant information such as the page's mission statement and how its been replaced with a definition found on another project page. Especially since the definition has very little to do with the project pages mission statement about the development of tools rather than adminship and edit counts usages. Mkdw 23:06, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

I was gone and didn't see the discussion here. But Mkdw left a strong comment on my talk page, and I don't have a strong opinion, so I removed the description that was copied from Edit count. I think they will probably end up merged sooner or later, but it's not really that important either way. --Interiot 03:48, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Maybe we can rename this page to reduce confusion in the future though? Or move the list elsewhere or something?  It hasn't been much of a wikiproject outside of Flcelloguy's tool.  --Interiot 03:50, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Meh, too much hassle. Tito xd (?!?) 04:19, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Ahh, I see. Edit count is almost exclusively backlinked by user edit count usefulness (later moved to User:Will Pittenger/User Boxes/Edit Count Usefulness), which is widely used, by User:Mkdw, among others.  That's why POV was brought up.  So maybe it's Edit count that should be renamed (to something like Edit counters considered harmful...  or merge it with Editcountitis?).  --Interiot 05:39, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I just changed the link in that userbox. Tito xd (?!?) 05:41, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 13:37, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Other projects?
Could the project's page discuss which counters can be used on other wikimedia projects, e.g. WikiNews?--Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 15:38, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * For the most part, all wikis other than enwiki have been able to use the toolserver for their edit counting, and AFAIK it hasn't been necessary to make it more complicated than that. It's only enwiki that's had the 6+ month timespan where its toolserver data was corrupt.  I think it's historically been better for individual wikis to point out what counter was best for it, especially with the toolserver supporting different wikis differently, and not all HTML scrapers necessarily supporting &uselang=en and thus probably not being suitable for scraping all languages.  (for what it's worth, Template:User2 has been one of the places on enwiki where a semi-official indication of the "best" edit counter to currently use has been made).
 * Also, there's word that MediaWiki itself will have a schema change that allows it to more efficiently track total edit count on-wiki... while it may not provide the full set of statistics, the on-wiki editcount could make this list less important. --Interiot 20:24, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Move
The first letter of the subject should be capitalised: WikiProject Edit counters.--Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 18:07, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

100,000,000 edit counts! Yeehah!
Again another Wikipedian statistical phenomenon has arrived! However, vandalisms and inactive users aside. First off for mine third compliment and perhaps the forth for this Wikipedia itself, I truly praise, commend and greatly congratulate this English Wikipedia once again for surpassing yet anoher Wiki-record of the One Hundred Millionth (or in figures: 100,000,000 ) mark of the total Wikipedians' Edit Counts!!! Yet this whopping number of what both users and Wikipedians have made up of this big free encyclopedia ever since July 2002AD and yet they never stop growing (as stated and based on/in the Wikipedian User Statistics)! WOW, what else can I say to express here, man!!? Thus, Congratulations and Kudos to the English Wikipedia! Keep the numbers going and keep on editing and contributing for more! Yaaahooooo!!! --onWheeZierPLot 00:40, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Weird. Special:Statistics shows over 100 million edits, but there's only revisions in the Revision table... Tito xd (?!?) 02:22, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Average number of edits per registered user?
Was wondering if and where is this mentioned? Mathmo Talk 08:32, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
 * There's some info about that at stats.wikimedia.org. Also, whoever updates the List of Wikipedians by number of edits page could probably modify their script/query to more precisely calculate this statistic, since they're calculating the edit count of every single user anyway.  --Interiot 10:48, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Edit Count Widget
I'm wondering if there's any interest in creating an edit count widget for Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) or later. There is already a wikipedia widget. The Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) operating system will have a tool to easily created widgets (right now, I am not capable of doing such a project without it) and I would be willing to collaborate with one or more willing participants who are versed in the sort of codes/tasks that would be necessary to pull it off. I do not want to "plagiarize" an existing edit counter (that is, have the widget act as a parasite, using the tool in some counter to "pull" data back to it for display), out of respect for those who have created the same, as well as to guard against such a counter no longer functioning or being modified to prevent such activity. I realize the Mac users aren't the largest percentage, but if there are one or more willing individuals here (or who might be curious to learn more), please let me know. Mac OS 10.5 isn't out yet, anyway. Fwgoebel 06:11, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
 * How much Java support does Mac OS have? Flcelloguy's Tool's Stats class is public, so it can output an object for your project to use... Tito xd (?!?) 07:23, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Excellent question! The following comes from "Mac Help" (on a Mac in the Finder), under the topic "Creating your own widgets": Anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS can create unique and useful widgets for Dashboard. For those who are familiar with programming, you can also incorporate AppleScripts, UNIX commands, and just about any Tiger technology into your widget using a custom plug-in. Mac OS X comes with everything you need to get started. Look for sample widgets and code in the developer tools that come with Mac OS X. To learn more about creating ingenious software for Mac OS X, visit the Apple Developer Connection website. At the top, simply search for "widget" and several good articles appear. Naturally, it would take a Mac that runs the Tiger (10.4.x) or later to actually test. For me personally, I would likely have to wait for 10.5 (Leopard) to be released. Fwgoebel 14:06, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
 * That's the problem... I'm waiting for Leopard to come out until I buy a Mac, so I can't really help until then, but we'd sure like to help in coding a widget. Tito xd (?!?) 06:59, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 18:42, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Source for Kate's tool
Does anyone know where I could obtain the Python source for "Kate's tool"? The link provided in this article gives one of delightful Apache Server errors... Does anyone perhaps have a working link? Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 16:33, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Here's a snapshot of it as it is on disk now, including whatever is causing the internal server error. --Interiot 17:03, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Great! Thanks! Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 19:41, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Comparable tools for admin stats?
Hey, I'm wondering if there's a quick and easy way for me to check my admin-specific stats (such as number of deletes, protections, and blocks). A cursory glance finds do such tools listed, but that doesn't necessarily mean such tools don't exist... EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 05:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Based on this comment, I just wrote one (a pretty simplistic one for the time being). I'll add it to my edit counter (it's accessible through a 'count' tab on your log once you have the counter installed), and here are your stats:

Log stats for EVula, 09:54, 13 February 2007 (UTC) newuseraccount 1 uploaded      29 moved         105 deleted       657 blocked       124 protected     43 unprotected   7 restored      13 unblocked     4
 * At the moment, it can count a maximum of 5000 logged actions. --ais523 09:54, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Redirect from Edit counter to WikiProject edit counters
Just to let everyone know that the edit counter redirect has been put up at redirects for discussion and can be found here, I am personally totally against this because I (as I expect many other users) frequently search "edit counter" in the search box to bring up the list of edit counters. Comments would be very much appreciated Ryan Postlethwaite See the mess I've created or let's have banter 00:53, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

New article log?
Is there any way of tracking new articles by user over an indefinite period of time? Say, for instance, I wished to find out what articles I'd created, would I have to go through more than 11000 edits in my contribution history looking for N all the way, or is there an easier computer-assisted way? Regards, Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 19:42, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I can manually run the report, though users with larger edit histories don't work because the query takes too long to run (more than 10 minutes), and DaBpunkt kills my query. Anyway, your report output is here.
 * Grr, the query got killed. I'll try to bug DaBpunkt to let me run it...  if the output doesn't turn up soon, feel free to ping my talk page.  --Interiot 19:47, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for doing this. Whenever you have time would be great, there's no rush. Best regards, Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 20:44, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
 * There is no actual way to generate from Special:Contributions data, though; the N marker is not in the output sent to the page. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 22:21, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
 * For some reason, the MySQL server keeps crashing, and seems to usually do it while running my query. Hopefully the toolserver admins can resolve it at some point.
 * The "N" isn't present on the toolserver either (it's only in the recentupdates table), so however one does it, the strategy is to 1) make a list of all articles the target user edited, 2) for each article edited, check whether the target user made the first edit to that article. The same thing could be done using query/api.php, or on a database dump with the full page history.  --Interiot 22:35, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Is there some way of doing this other than perl? Some nifty link I can point to, etc? Arthurrh 00:31, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * What's irritating is that Special:Newpages would be the perfect place to do this, but the underlying log that is being queried only retains data for around 30 days. Given that there are less than two million new articles created per year, it doesn't really seem necessary to do this kind of pruning - searching an indexed log of a few million entries is trivial work for computer servers these days, and additional hard drive storage costs would be on the order of $10 per year.  -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 14:48, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

See also 10730. --ais523 16:35, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Milestone Edits
I might be in the wrong place, but I'm still searching. I've noticed a few user pages that mention their milestone edits (first, hundredth, etc.) but I can't figure out how to look back and find my own milestones. Can anyone help? Stoneice02 02:33, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * This is probably the right place to ask, but I don't know of any counters that do that. You can work it out by going to 'earliest' in Special:Contributions and counting it backwards (assuming you don't mind missing deleted edits) for small numbers. --ais523 17:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't be so hard to do, edit-counter wise, but I had never heard of a request to do this. What does everyone else think? Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 03:50, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * It seems reasonable. Due to the way my counter works, it would be highly difficult to add to mine, but counters like Interiot's Tool1 (or even Tool3; this is one count which is largely unaffected by replication-lag!) would be able to manage it quite easily, I think. --ais523 09:37, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Such a tool does exist, I remember seeing it. Perhaps click though all the links on this age until you see the option for it?! Personally though... I'm off to sleep, zzzz.... Mathmo Talk 14:57, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've added this tool ("Milestone") to the page. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 14:41, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Visit Counters
There are counters for the contribs to a page, but a visit counter for a page would be nice to have (forgive me if this is too difficult/impossible for script writers to do, I know 0 programming languages :-P ). ~ St ep tr ip  22:37, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * To make a completely accurate hit counter, we need access either to the Apache server logs, or to the MediaWiki database. However, we a) don't have access to either one, and b) visitor data isn't kept anyways, as it takes away the advantage of having a Squid cache server. There's approximations, such as WikiCharts. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 03:49, 21 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the input, I figured that it would be impossible to do. ~ St ep tr <font face="Vivaldi" color="#00FFFF" size="3">ip  19:43, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Help?
Why do I get such enormously different edit counts with this and this? --Smokizzy 15:42, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The first counter you linked is based on the toolserver, which has been having problems 'replicating' edits from the English Wikipedia (specifically English, and specifically Wikipedia) for ages, and therefore gives an out-of-date result. The second counter is based on Special:Contributions, and so should be up to date. --ais523 15:55, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Kate's Counter Internal Link
Can anyone tell me if it is possible to make an internal in Wikipedia for the following link.


 * Interiot's edit counter, external website, nothing to install, written in perl (aka Tool1, wannabe_kate) (screenshot)

Surely it is possible to create a link since it is still part of the Wikipedia network. PLease reply on my User talk page. Cheers. pizza1512 Talk Autograph 18:34, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It's not possible, actually, because the toolserver is not defined as part of the Interwiki map. Maybe that is something that would warrant fixing. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 19:22, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've requested it (just 4 months late!) Neil   ム  13:18, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

User:Bryan_Derksen
Exactly how many edits does he have? Many of the external editcounters stop and say he has too many. I quote: "too many pages, terminating" and many different error notices. Thanks, Razor  c  law  21:18, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Per Flcelloguy's Tool:

Statistics for: Bryan Derksen (Permissions: N/A) - Total: 78987 - Main: 66020 Talk: 3450 User: 327 User talk: 982 Wikipedia: 2038 Wikipedia talk: 297 Image: 2039 Image talk: 16 MediaWiki: 1 MediaWiki talk: 7 Template: 361 Template talk: 54 Help: 2 Help talk: 1 Category: 3337 Category talk: 53 Portal: 2 --- Total edits: 78987 w/ edit summary: 72342 (91.58%*) w/ manual edit summary: 70676 (89.47%*) Minor edits: 49522 (62.69%*) First known edit: Aug 21, 2001 --- --- Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 06:10, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * - percentages are rounded down to the nearest hundredth.
 * 80280 by the server's editcount field, which uses a slightly different definition of 'edit'. --ais523 14:24, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Difference between Kate's tool and database lookup
I hope I'm not duplicating another discussion about this at another location, but I've been curious as to the differences between queries made by Kate's tool (and other such edit counters) and those tools that simply query the relevant field in the database (such as query.php and Special:Preferences). For example, using Kate's tool, I get 3940 edits and 252 deleted edits, while my Preferences page shows 3980 edits. &mdash; Super-Magician (talk • contribs • count) 01:52, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I think Kate's tool has a lag. Neil   ム  08:23, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Toolserver-based tools (like the original Kate's tool) use the toolserver's local copy of the database, which isn't updated in real-time (instead, the real database, minus some private information like passwords, is copied over to it every now and then). Screen-scraping tools (like my edit counter and Interiot's "Wannabe Kate" counter) work by looking through Special:Contributions, and therefore count the number of non-deleted edits you have plus the number of automatic null edits that are created when you perform other actions (for instance, when you move a page, that counts as 2, or 4 if you move the talk page as well, due to the entries in the old and the new edit history that notify that it's been moved); a deleted edit counts as 0, and there's no lag. The server's database field (shown on Special:Preferences and accessible via query.php) counts edits in real time too, but uses a different definition of 'edit'; editing a page counts as 1, even if the edit is later deleted, and moving a page - or anything else that isn't technically an edit - counts as 0 (the automatic null edits that appear in your contributions aren't counted). I hope that helps to clear things up! --ais523 09:57, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Tools: prefix
I requested the   prefix to be added to the Interwiki map. It has now been added, so, for example, one could link to Interiot's tool using ~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate - like so: ~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate. And as soon as the script copies the map across into the database, that link will actually work. Neil  ム  11:50, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Is it just me?
The only counter I can reliably get to work is Wannabe Kate - regular Kate and Interiot just hang there. Am I doing something wrong? Tvoz | talk 07:05, 12 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Nah ... they work and then don't work ... I've used three different counters over the past year or so. Squamate —Preceding unsigned comment added by Squamate (talk • contribs) 18:28, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Discrepancy
Why is it that the (total) count shown on my preferences page is often different from some of the most commonly used counters (such as Kate's Tool and WannabeKate)? Example: right now wannabekate shows a total count of 14,448 and the my preferences shows 14,533. Which count is more accurate? Van Tucky  Talk 21:10, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * They are all, assuming no database lag, of course. The discrepancies have to do with different definitions of what an edit is, as described above. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 22:18, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * That makes sense. Thanks, Van Tucky  Talk 22:55, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Page creation counter
Hey Guys! I was wondering if anybody knows an active page creation counter/list creator? I found the script for one by interion here, but have no idea to implement it (and interion's gone awol). --<font style="background:f2ffeb;" size="1" face="century gothic" color="#000000">linca <font face="century gothic" size="1" style="background:f2ffeb;" color="#339922">linca 07:12, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Unable to opt-in
Hello, since August I try to opt-in to the editcount, but I always have the same error:

Then the error is: Software error: Unable to connect to database: Unknown MySQL server host '-p.db.ts.wikimedia.org' (1) at /home/interiot/public_html/perllib/ZedlerUtils.pm line 50. For help, please send mail to the webmaster (toolserver@paperlined.org), giving this error message and the time and date of the error. I emailed toolserver@paperlined.org, but I didn't received any answer. Please help me.
 * I make the dummy edit:
 * I go to
 * I refresh the page with Shift+Ctrl+R
 * I click on the image with "opt-in"

You can respond me on my page at french Wikipedia: Hercule bzh --Hercule bzh 16:14, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Compare edit times of two editors
Is there any edit counter to find out when editors edit? I saw a recent graph were the editor compared the edit times of two editors too find a sock. Is a edit counter like this available? Travb (talk) 15:23, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I've added a new feature to my edit counter (User:ais523/editcount; as it's a user script, it requires installation on your username, but that isn't complicated) to do this. It isn't even as slow as the other features of my counter! --ais523 16:44, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Interiot's EC query
On Interiot's Edit Counter, what does the Opt-in mean? It has a lot of graphs underneath the words and semi-transparent black screen. Simply south (talk) 01:31, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I think it's to do with German privacy laws. Some features of the counter won't be enabled on a particular user unless they specifically indicate that they want those data to be displayed; if you click on one of those images, it will give you instructions on what to do to enable those features. --ais523 09:40, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Except that doesn't work anymore. Sakkura (talk) 21:22, 4 December 2007 (UTC)


 * OK. What would it have been doing? Would it mean, or example, showing graphs and information for everyone to see. Basically, opt-in for what? Simply south (talk) 23:49, 4 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, the opt-in would let the data for your account be displayed by time and by the type of page edited, with those graphs you can see in the background (or on the page for those who have already opted in). Apparently German law wouldn't permit showing that information to everyone unless the user opted in. Sakkura (talk) 08:41, 5 December 2007 (UTC)


 * That explains things quite clearly. Thank you both. Now i wish it would say that on the edit counter, instead of showing "Opt-in" with no explanation as to what for. Simply south (talk) 10:41, 5 December 2007 (UTC)