User blog comment:Telinc1/What can we do to make Oasis better/@comment-188432-20111020160416

Well, I dislike the masthead thing of "X edits since joining this wiki", since it can be wrong, especially for editors who've been around since the early Wikicities days. I've provided a few cases to the staff of the date being flatly wrong. That is, there are people on w:c:tardis who have edits in their logs which precede the supposed join date. And our founder has a join date AFTER other people, which makes no particular sense. If FOUNDING a wiki doesn't count as JOINING it, then the stat is flatly wrong.

Another point is that many users start out as anons. Others register but don't edit for a while, as they read the forums or policy pages first. But they'll still think they've joined the community when they first start poking around the wiki. From a philosophical standpoint, I think it's wrong to suggest, as the current language does, that "joining" a wiki is necessarily equivalent to editing it. This is especially true on wikis where the chat function is enabled. I've had a few cases at tardis where people with 0 edits have made valuable contributions through chat. These users are definitely part of the tardis community, in my eyes.

Also, some wikis start out with other hosts and then migrate to Wikia. Their user's "join" stats will be completely wrong, as they are with older users at Memory Alpha.

Therefore, I think the language should drop the reference to "joining the wiki". I think it should be one of three things.

One possibility is, "x edits since ". This is simple, elgant and indisputable. Of course, there's no indication why that date is significant, but it's preferable to the current system because it's not a lie.

Another is, "x edits since [they/he/she] started editing on ", with the [they/he/she] thing being responsive to whether they've set gender in their profiles. This is what the stat is actually trying to say, so let it say it!

Finally, my personal favorite is simply to let go of the date altogether, because there are obvious and demonstrable errors in the code. Just make it, "X edits so far". Period. Leave it at that. Don't try to make it relative to a certain, sometimes dubious join date. With one simple little move, you release the dev team from having to figure out the errors in the code, and you make the number have a fairly unassailable meaning.