This is a small program that prints a chart, in the form of a calendar (based on the year you choose),1 that shows the days a specified user contributed to a specific Wikipedia project (that is, a specific Wikipedia language) and the amount of edits they made in that day. The program also counts the total amount of edits made in the year and the streak of edits.2 Head to the Screenshots section to see how it looks. The contribution chart from GitHub was my inspiration.
Charts like this exist in some websites. Although they look cool, I don't think they provide anything useful, and, in some cases, I believe they're noxious as force you to keep contributing (even if you don't want to) or preserve a streak that is, pretty much, useless. This may not seem like an issue, but I do believe it's wrong to make a change (in any website) just to keep the chart "pretty".
I didn't code this program for people to make it part of their contribution schedule to Wikipedia, where what people should do is contribute when they have something good to provide.
To get the chart, simply go to https://wikipedia-edits-chart.glitch.me and add the required parameters. Below you can find the list of the available path and query parameters, as well as some examples. If the user couldn't be found or there are no edits for the choosen year, the website will let you know with a red message.
To see the amount of katas completed in a day, you must hover over that day.
| Parameter | Required | Default value | Available values |
|---|---|---|---|
| username | yes | ||
| language3 | yes | ||
| year | no | Current year | |
| theme | no | light | light, dark |
| translated | no | false | false, true |
- See the edits from Jimbo Wales in the English Wikipedia in 2020:
- See the edits from Jimbo Wales in the English Wikipedia in 2022 in dark mode:
- The limit of edits to retrieve is 500 per request, as stated in the "Usercontribs" API section of the Mediawiki Action API. The output JSON contains a value that you can use to continue the retrieval of the data if the number of edits exceeds the limit; however, it has to make another request, and, because the program loops one by one through all of the edits (as Wikimedia asks you to not make the requests in parallel), it may take some seconds for users that have made many edits. Based on some requests I made, it takes roughly 500ms per 1000 edits. Please, don't overwhelm the website.
- When no one has made a request to the website in 5 minutes, Glitch (the host I'm using) turns off the website. In this case, you'll need to wait some seconds for the chart to appear. There is also a limited amount of hours per month for the free plan (which is the one I'm using).
- The timezone used by the program is UTC. This is because it's faster this way for the user to get the chart (as he would need to also type in the timezone they want). However, I may introduce the feature to select a specific timezone in the future.
Footnotes
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The shape of the months are different from one another because, instead of printing the days as GitHub does, it prints them like a normal calendar. You can see the day of the week by counting the row the day is in. It starts at Monday and finishes at Sunday. ↩
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If you choose the current year, it will print the current streak. If you choose any other year that has already passed, it will print the longest streak made. ↩
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Wikipedia is available in many languages. Wikimedia uses a combination of standards to define the language codes. Here is a list of language codes for you to know. If you choose to translate the text, the target language will be the one of the Wikipedia project you chose; if, for example, you chose to see your edits in the Wikipedia in italian, the text will appear in italian (if the translation exists). ↩