Wikipedia:Edit count

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"WP:EC" redirects here. You may be looking for Help:Edit conflict.

See main project at Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters for more info and a list of available edit counters.

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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

Edit counts are a quick and crude aid when trying to measure a Wikipedian's experience in the Wikipedia community.

Quality, not quantity.

As a small protection against sock puppetry, certain community opinion processes — such as Articles for deletion — may discount comments made by extremely new users (those with very few edits or those accounts that were made very recently). However, Wikipedia tries not to base decisions on votes, but on consensus; decisions based on discussion and reasoning, so even very new editors who give good reasons for their stance can sway others to their side.

Some users partially base their Request for adminship votes on the edit counts of the candidates. Reasons for this may include protection against sock puppetry, and the fact that active admins are needed to help with admin backlogs.

As edits can vary greatly in size and quality, it is important not to put too much weight into someone's 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. As the saying goes, "Quality, not quantity".

[edit] What is an edit count?

An edit count is a number stored for each user which counts the number of edits that that user has made. The simplest method to count edits counts each edit a user makes as 1; this is the method used by the server when generating the efficient counts shown in Special:Preferences. Note that this 'server count' also counts deleted edits; if one of your edits is deleted (for instance, because you placed a speedy-delete tag on an article, and the article was deleted as a result), that doesn't cause your server count to drop.

However, many edit counters that create more detailed results rely on looking through Special:Contributions and counting edits there. Because deleted edits are only visible to administrators, and even then only when they specifically request to see them, counting edits from contributions does not count deleted edits; therefore this 'contribution count' is normally lower than the server count. It does, however, count some things the server does not as edits; for instance, if you rename a page, that adds a history entry on both the old and new names of the page to show that the page was renamed, and therefore counts as 2 towards a user's contributions count. If the page being moved had a talk page, which was renamed as well, that counts as 2 more, so a single move can add up to 4 to a user's contribution count, whilst it would add 0 to the server count. This explains to some extent why different edit counters will give different counts for the same user. (Note that counters which return contribution counts are generally heavy on the servers compared to counters which return server count, and so should be used infrequently.)

Some counters don't read Special:Contributions, nor query the server for the server count, but instead make use of a backup of the Wikipedia database stored on the 'toolserver'. The original edit counter was (and is) of this nature. Due to the way these counters can access the database, they can often give separate counts for deleted and non-deleted edits, giving more information of this sort than other counters; however, the toolserver copy of the database is not updated in real-time, and therefore such counts are often slightly out of date (and therefore too low). The toolserver count can be higher than either of the others, though, because not all deleted edits are counted in the server count for users who have had an account for a long time (because the server counts have not existed forever and don't include some old deleted edits, although they should include all edits that have never been deleted, as long as edits that were deleted since the server counts came into existence).