On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 5:19 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
You can try using the dumps, as Platonides suggested, or what I would do in
this case is use the public API. Every Wikimedia wiki has one, for example:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php>. That allows you to easily get lists
of
the contributors to any page, which you can then aggregate and analyze.
Thank you for the information and feedback. What I need is somewhat more
complicated than a list of contributors to a single page. In fact, there is
already a tool in Wikipedia (just called contributors, I think) that lists
all the contributors to an article and their number of edits. What I need to
do is, using that list of contributors, select the top 20 or so (excluding
bots) for each of the hundred selected articles and get a list of all of the
other articles to which each of them contributed with a frequency count of
edits. Ideally, this data would be in a table of sorts for each article
selected (so 100 tables).
This could, of course, be done manually by searching for contributions by
username. however, this will be time consuming and possibly error prone. My
hope was that a query could grab this information fairly quickly as well as
automatically count frequencies of edits per article, etc.
I don't have the expertise to do this myself, but I do know someone who can
and has requested an account. However, he is afraid he will not be granted
an account for what will likely be a one time project.
Is there likely an API that can do what I described or would a query be an
easier or more efficient way to go?
Thanks again.
--
Jim