Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters/Internationalization

There are several issues that need to be dealt with when designing an edit counter to work on other MediaWikis, especially on those in other languages.

General issues

Enumerating all servers

• m:Special:SiteMatrix lists all Wikimedia wikis
  • ~interiot/wiki_list, the list that toolserver projects use internally
• m:Sites using MediaWiki lists outside MediaWikis that may be running different versions of MediaWiki. Non-toolserver tools may be able to work with these.

Testing

• This is a page that 1) lists servers by number of articles, and 2) lists admins on those servers, in order of account creation, some of whom likely have a high number of edits. It's largely intended to be used for testing of edit counters, especially on international servers. (this certainly isn't the only way to find candidates for edit-count testing, it's just one that seemed easier to me)

Query.php

This new method is much easier than scraping HTML. It should be installed on all WikiMedia servers, but may not be installed on all third-party MediaWiki servers.

• To get a list of namespaces, use query.php?what=namespaces
• To get a user's contributions, use query.php?what=usercontribs&titles=User:YurikBot&uclimit=20&uccomments

HTML scrapers

Dates and (next 50) links can be difficult to parse across different languages. The easiest way to resolve this is to call Special:Contributions with &uselang=en, which will present the dates and links in a uniform format. (for example)