This miscellaneous page was nominated for deletion on April 15, 2006. The result of the discussion was speedy keep. An archived record of this discussion can be found here.

Scope?

Is the project just for edit counters, or other things too? I'd like to keep track of tools people write like:

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)

On the other hand, there's already m:Toolserver/Projects and wikitech-l and #wikimedia-toolserver. *shrug* --Interiot 01:37, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Another useful link: [1] Tito xd^(?!?) 07:46, 9 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

en.wikipedia.org data is no longer updated

How about just a tad more detail? Perhaps an explanation? Rfrisbie^talk 02:36, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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#Toolserver is effectively down, 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)[reply]

Thanks for the clarification, unfortunate as it may be. :-( Good luck with the related projects! :-) Rfrisbie^talk 15:31, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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 :-) Gwernol 04:44, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, we have gotten a SourceForge account. Tito xd^{(?!? - help us)} 05:00, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm

I have noticed that Kate and Interiot's tools are working again, (albeit slowly) what changed? Highway ^{Rainbow Sneakers} 17:39, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

For toolserver counters, the status should be at m: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)[reply]

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 (U T C)

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

"The toolserver days" :) I guess it seems like an epoch since it was up. There's Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits, and it lists the queries they run, I believe. --Interiot 02:00, 23 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Merge with Wikipedia: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)[reply]

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, Wikipedia: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. Wikipedia:Editcountitis) that are longish, I'm not sure whether we'd consider merging them as well. --Interiot 21:32, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

I still don't see why you would want to have two lists of editcounters, though, so I've removed that list from Wikipedia:Edit count and pointed towards here. Tito xd^(?!?) 22:10, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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 Wikipedia: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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

The only thing that was merged was the duplicate list that had no reason for being on Wikipedia: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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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 Wikipedia: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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Meh, too much hassle. Tito xd^(?!?) 04:19, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ahh, I see. Wikipedia: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 Wikipedia:Edit count that should be renamed (to something like Wikipedia:Edit counters considered harmful... or merge it with Wikipedia:Editcountitis?). --Interiot 05:39, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just changed the link in that userbox. Tito xd^(?!?) 05:41, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia: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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Move

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

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)[reply]