Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Started/@comment-24314079-20180912232951/@comment-9605025-20180913012807

With a few exceptions, a single edit is when you publish a page with changes. So if you publish a page but there are no changes, it doesn't count. If you publish a page after changing 1 character, it counts as 1 edit. If you publish a page after changing 1,000,000 characters, it is still just 1 edit.

Because it works this way, some users abuse the system and add content one word, image, template parameter, etc. at a time. This gives them a misleadingly high edit count. Because of that, as well as because of its impact for wikis that use the Achievements extension to award badges to users, a decent amount of admins will warn a user against doing so. In the event that the warned user doesn't stop, admins may ban them from the wiki.