wiki_userinfo: Retrieve user information

Description

Retrieves information about a user, or set of users, from the MediaWiki API, including registration date, gender and editcount.

Usage

wiki_userinfo(con, usernames, properties = c("blockinfo", "groups", "implicitgroups",
                                             "rights", "editcount", "registration",
                                             "emailable", "gender"))

Arguments

con

A connector object, generated by wiki_con, that corresponds to the project you're trying to query.

usernames

The username(s) of the users you want information on - this should be provided as a vector. There is a hard limit of 50 distinct users per query, set by MediaWiki's API; in the event that you go over this, a warning will be issued and the query will only

properties

The user properties you're interested in. Applicable properties are "blockinfo" (details about the user's block, if they are currently blocked), "groups" (the user groups the user is a member of), "implicitgroups" (groups they are a member of through inhe

Warnings

There are a few caveats with the data provided by wiki_userinfo, mostly stemming around historical inconsistencies and peculiarities in MediaWiki.

groups and implicitgroups gives you the user's permissions and group membership on the project you are querying, not their membership on all projects - while you can find out if "Ironholds" is not a sysop on, say, enwiki, that doesn't mean they aren't a sysop elsewhere - there is no universal, API-accessible user groups listing.

As an extension of the lack of centrality in Wikimedia's infrastructure, registration tells you the date their account was created on the wiki you are querying. If they initially registered on that wiki, this is accurate - if they registered on a different wiki, this instead reflects the date and time that they first visited the wiki you're querying while logged-in. For users registered before 2006, when registration logging was introduced, the registration value represents not when they first registered, but when their first edit was, since that was used as an estimator for existing accounts when the field was first populated.

Examples

Run this code

#Create connector
ih_connector <- wiki_con(language = "en", project = "wikipedia")

#Query
ironholds_userinfo <- wiki_userinfo(con = ih_connector, usernames = "Ironholds",
                                    properties = c("editcount","gender"))

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