Wikipedia:Editcountitis

Editcountitis, or obsessive edit-counting disorder (OECD), is a serious condition consisting of an unhealthy obsession with the number of edits you have made to Wikipedia (or another online resource). Thankfully, no fatalities or serious injuries have been recorded. Furthermore, if caught early, resumption of normal life activities may be possible.

Symptoms

Classic symptoms:

• Using one of the tools listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters to check your edit count more often than you check your watchlist.
• Having an edit counter as your home page.
• Never using the preview button, so corrections to your own typos increase your count.
• Thinking of your position in The List as a competition.
• Getting frustrated if you click on "My contributions" and then click on "Edit count", only to be confronted with an icon saying that the replication lag is high so that any edits made within the last eight hours will not be counted.
• In extreme cases, making bad changes just so you can revert them.
• In really extreme cases, keeping a current manual count on your user page and frequently updating it.
• When you update your manual count, habitually forgetting to include the edit in which you just updated your manual count, and making another edit or three just to put it right.
• Voting support or oppose based on number of edits at Requests for adminship, rather than by checking the user's contributions.
• Editing the main sandbox, or your own sandbox if you are a registered user, excessively.
• Playing the random article game too much.

If you find yourself exhibiting at least one of these symptoms, consider seeking professional help. Remember:

Every time an account with more than 200,000 edits is renamed, the developers kill a server kitty. Please, think of the server kitties.

• Unless you want to be an admin, nobody really cares how many edits you've made. Even then, it's really not quantity, but quality, that matters.
• After your tenth edit, there is no prize for making 2,000, 3,000, 10,000, 2¹⁶ (65,536), 2¹⁷ (131,072), or even 2¹⁸ (262,144) edits. Full disclosure: there are some privileges based on edit count, related to Wikipedia elections, edit filters, image moves, and AutoWikiBrowser software, but the vast majority are granted on or before 1,000 edits.
• If you've made over 200,000 edits, your account can't be renamed as it would kill a server kitten.
• No matter how high you rank on The List of Wikipediholics, you'll never catch me!

Seriously, though...

Editcountitis is used humorously to suggest a belief that a Wikipedian's overall contribution level can be measured solely by their edit count. This is a phenomenon which some think may be harmful to processes such as requests for adminship, as well as to the Wikipedia community in itself. The problems with using edit counts to measure relative level of experience are that it does not take into account that users could have an extensive edit history prior to registering an account (posting anonymously), and that major and minor edits are counted equally, regardless of whether the edit is a typo fix, or the creation of a full article.

Furthermore, edit counts do not judge the quality of the edits, as insightful comments on talk pages and acts of vandalism are counted equally. Hence, it is not always a reliable way of telling how experienced or worthy a user truly is. Nevertheless, using the edit count tool is often useful for obtaining a very rough idea of how the editor interacts with the Wikipedia and how much experience he or she has.

All edits are perfectly welcome, including WikiGnomish edits like fixing typos. Each edit consumes disk space and other resources, so please do not edit in a manner intended to increase your edit count artificially, such as never using preview. Remember what we are all doing here is building an encyclopedia, not competing to see who makes the most edits.

Editing tools

"Mr. President, we must not allow... a mine shaft gap!"

There is a perception among some that editing tools such as Twinkle and Huggle inflate edit counts. This has even led some to oppose the adminship of candidates who heavily use such tools, as judged by relative edit counts. This is a more subtle form of editcountitis. A narrow focus of any sort for a prospective admin is surely a concern, but discouraging people from constructively using the tools available to them is a concern as well. The irony is that this logic is likely a misguided response meant to discourage editcountitis, to discourage those who would inflate their edit counts with "easy" edits to gain credibility.

Forced to make many edits

Not everyone with a high edit-count is actually a sloppy editor, with change a phrase & save, change a phrase & save, etc. They might have tried to keep their edit-count below 40,000. However, some people, in their daily roles are, more or less, forced to make many minor edits, such as reverting a whole collection of random articles that a vandal has quickly trashed. Presto: 30 edits (for "nothing"). Many major articles are edit-protected from public enemy #1 (the "anonymous IP vandals"). However, vast numbers of articles are not, due to bizarre vandalism ideas: a vandal finds article titles with letters "boo" to become "boob" (or such), in an endless universe of puns. Even privileged users must increment their edit-counters for undoing bad edits or fixing categories (etc.), as part of their daily tasks. Those people shouldn't be condemned for having a high edit-count.

See also

• Wikipedia:Edits Per Day (The truth! Not these lies! Signed: The Editcount Fairy.)
• Wikipedia:Barnstaritis

External links

• Edit counting (at the Meta-Wiki)