Wikipedia:Editcountitis

Editcountitis
Editcountitis
Other names	Obsessive edit-counting disorder (OECD), Edit count addiction (ECA)
	An illustration of a woman suffering from editcountitis
Symptoms	Stress
Complications	Stress
Duration	Until the editor takes a break
Causes	Nothing else to do / procrastinating
Prevention	Not caring
Treatment	Taking a break

This is a humorous essay.

It contains humorous advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and isn't meant to be taken seriously. This is not an encyclopedia article or one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines and may not represent community consensus.

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This page contains material that is considered humorous.
Such material is not meant to be taken seriously.

Editcountitis or obsessive edit-counting disorder (OECD) is an addiction consisting of an unhealthy obsession with the number of edits one has made to Wikipedia or another online resource. Luckily, no fatalities or serious injuries have been recorded so far. Furthermore, if caught early, resumption of normal life activities may be possible. Sequelae may persist.

Symptoms

Classic symptoms:

Gloating over an extremely high edit count generated by excessive bot usage, often at the rate of 100s of "edits" per minute – and then boasting about being one of the most active Wikipedians on your user page.
Announcing on your user page or your talk page that one of your main aims in editing is to reach 1,000 edits, or 10,000, or 100,000 edits, or any other number you pick out of the air.
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.
Copy editing one sentence at a time to get more edits out of an article.
Not using the preview button, so corrections to your own typos increase your count.
Always making sure to be logged in before editing, for the sole purpose of not wasting this precious opportunity to increase your count. (This item was added by a Wikipedian who didn't log in. ;-))
Thinking of your position in The List as a competition.
Deliberately creating lots of typos in your edits so that you can fix them later, increasing your edit count.
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.
Being especially frustrated if you clicked on the "My contributions" icon and then clicked on "Edit count" at 22:52 UTC on April 2, 2012, when information was given that the replication lag was so high that any edits made within the previous "2 weeks, 1 hours, 36 minutes, 21 seconds" prior to that date would not be counted (or in severe cases, calling this "black letter day").
Being overcome by overwhelming emotion and relief when the aforementioned replication lag problem ended on April 3, 2012.
Getting annoyed every time you make an edit, but get into an edit conflict wherein someone else does the edit you wanted to do.
In extreme cases, making bad changes just so you can revert them later.
In really extreme cases, keeping a current manual count on your user page and frequently updating it (since the act of merely updating it increases your count!).
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 correct it again. Technically, you could do this forever, adding one each time you increase your manual count, but we hope you don't.
Voting support or oppose based on number of edits at Requests for adminship, rather than by checking the user's actual contributions.
Editing the main sandbox, or your own sandbox excessively.
Checking the edit count of any other editor that you come across in Wikipedia to see who has the most.
Becoming a New Page Reviewer for the sole purpose of being able to more easily increase your edit count by correcting typos and grammar and spelling errors.
"Accidentally" vandalizing pages using a temporary account, just so you can login and revert them.
Using an edit counter script, and running it over and over again to increase your edit count. You could do this forever, thinking no one would see it as it would disappear from Recent Changes instantly, due to the fact that so many edits are made on Wikipedia. Please don't do this, though!
Playing the random article game too much.
Removal of whitespace characters, one at a time.
Playing The Wikipedia Adventure over and over (even if they've been editing for years), as to artificially inflate their edit count with the automatic edits.
Clicking "Save page" when you did not make any changes and saved it again, or deleting and then re-typing one word or letter.
Joining the Birthday and Welcoming Committees so that you can easily raid the Birthday Calendar and the User creation log and easily ensure a hundred edits per day, or maybe per hour!
Randomly hanging out at XfD discussions commenting "Keep/Delete per above", "Keep/Delete per Example", "Delete per nom".
Throwing a party each time you reach significant milestones on your edit count (e.g. one thousand edits, two thousand edits and so on and so forth).
Boasting your edit count to gain support, trust, and rizz. (Please don't use your Wikipedia edit count for applications, especially professional or romantic relationships, any "skill" of spamming isn't even that useful anywhere. Only fellow spammers want these types of people.)
Renaming files over on the Wikimedia Commons using your unified username, causing said files to automatically be renamed on Wikipedia using your account (thus boosting your count).
Creating a bunch of redirects to an existing article, no matter how tenuous.
Mass importing short descriptions from Wikidata without checking to see if they meet WP:HOWTOSD.
The persistent expression of grandiose delusions on Wikipedia.
Turning short descriptions to local.
Pressing a link that leads you to the "Edit source" of any page.
Adding "?action=edit" at the end of the link of any editable page of Wikipedia.
Adding one category per edit, even though one edit can add multiple categories to a page at once.
Adding categories to redirects, even though you know it's optional.
Adding to this list.
Adding to this list again.
And again.
And one more time for good measure.
And another time after that, for even better measure.
Purposely making a tiny formatting tweak on your own user CSS or JS subpages, saving it, and immediately checking your contributions to verify it logged successfully.

Registered editors by edit count, including those with no edits
If you have made...	you are about 1 in	then you rank in the...	or the...	That's more than...
1 edit	3	top 29.6% of all users	top 16,200,000 of all users	70.4% of all users
2 edits	5	top 18.1% of all users	top 9,900,000 of all users	81.9% of all users
5 edits	10	top 8.65% of all users	top 4,700,000 of all users	91.35% of all users
10 edits	20	top 4.85% of all users (the autoconfirmed)	top 2,660,000 of all users	95.15% of all users
100 edits	100	top 0.68% of all users	top 373,000 of all users	99.32% of all users
500 edits	666	top 0.15% of all users (the extended confirmed)	top 81,490 of all users	99.85% of all users
1,000 edits	800	top 0.125% of all users	top 68,000 of all users	99.875% of all users
10,000 edits	4,000	top 0.025% of all users	top 13,700 of all users	99.975% of all users
25,000 edits	10,000	top 0.0098% of all users	top 5,380 of all users	99.9902% of all users
50,000 edits	22,000	top 0.0046% of all users	top 2,520 of all users	99.9954% of all users
100,000 edits	53,000	top 0.0019% of all users	top 1,040 of all users	99.9981% of all users
250,000 edits	164,000	top 0.00061% of all users	top 325 of all users	99.99939% of all users
500,000 edits	770,000	top 0.00013% of all users	top 70 of all users	99.99987% of all users
1,000,000 edits	2,700,000	top 0.000037% of users	top 20 of all users	99.999963% of all users

Registered editors by edit count (only accounts with contributions)
If you have made...	you are about 1 in	then you rank in the...	or the...	That's more than...
1 edit	1	–	one of 16,200,000 contributors	–
2 edits	1-2	top 61.1% of contributors	top 9,900,000 of all contributors	38.9% of all contributors
5 edits	3	top 29% of contributors	top 4,700,000 of all contributors	71% of all contributors
10 edits	6	top 16.36% of contributors (the autoconfirmed)	top 2,660,000 of all contributors	83.64% of all contributors
100 edits	44	top 2.3% of contributors	top 373,000 of all contributors	97.7% of all contributors
500 edits	200	top 0.5% of contributors (the extended confirmed)	top 81,490 of all contributors	99.5% of all contributors
1,000 edits	240	top 0.42% of contributors	top 68,000 of all contributors	99.58% of all contributors
10,000 edits	1,200	top 0.084% of contributors	top 13,700 of all contributors	99.916% of all contributors
25,000 edits	3,000	top 0.033% of contributors	top 5,380 of all contributors	99.967% of all contributors
50,000 edits	6,450	top 0.0155% of contributors	top 2,520 of all contributors	99.9845% of all contributors
100,000 edits	15,600	top 0.0064% of contributors	top 1,040 of all contributors	99.9936% of all contributors
250,000 edits	50,000	top 0.002% of contributors	top 325 of all contributors	99.998% of all contributors
500,000 edits	232,600	top 0.00043% of contributors	top 70 of all contributors	99.99957% of all contributors
For the purposes of this table, a "contributor" is an account with at least one published edit on the English Wikipedia.

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

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 500th edit, there is no prize for making 1,000, 2,000, 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, AutoWikiBrowser software, and access to paywalled sources, but the vast majority are granted on or before 1,000 edits.
No matter what your current count is, if you've edited Wikipedia at all, you are already above average.
No matter how high you rank on the list of Wikipediholics, you'll never catch me! (That's what the creator of this page thought anyway. He's number 3595 in the list!)

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 Wikipedia and how much experience they have, and tools which allow a breakdown of an edit count by month can give a good impression of how consistent an editor's activity has been over the years.

All edits are perfectly welcome, including wikignomish edits like fixing typos. However, 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

Editing tools such as Twinkle and Huggle inflate edit counts, and because many people think that some use these tools solely to inflate edit count, some have opposed 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.

External links

Edit counting (at the Meta-Wiki)

v t e Wikipediholism
Identification	Signs of Wikipediholism Wikipediholism test legacy modern Wikipediholic userbox 1 Wikipediholic userbox 2
Analysis and symptoms	Who, why? (inactive) Wikipedihol Wikipedia is an MMORPG Editcountitis Editsummarisis Articlecountitis Barnstaritis Adminitis Templatitis Watchlistitis Userboxitis Talk page stalking WikiProphecy
Fighting Wikipediholism	Recovering from Wikipediholism Wikipatch Wikipediholics in denial Clinic for Wikipediholics Confessed Wikipediholics Wikipediholic user warning templates Taking a Wikibreak
Wikipediholics listed by...	Number of edits page 2 Number of recent edits (inactive) Active editing streak Article count page 2 Featured article nominations Good article nominations Thanks received User page watchers Bot edits