Wikipedia:Edit count

Some users partially base their Request for adminship votes on the edit counts of the candidates. Reasons for this may include protection against sock puppetry, and the fact that active admins are needed to help with admin backlogs.

There are many reasons why a total number of edits usually does not indicate quality of work, quality of an editor, or significance of contributions. These include the following:

However, many edit counters that create more detailed results rely on looking through and counting edits there. Because deleted edits are only visible to administrators, and even then only when they specifically request to see them, counting edits from contributions does not count deleted edits; therefore this 'contribution count' is normally lower than the server count. It does, however, count some actions the server does not as edits; for instance, if you rename a page, that adds a history entry on both the old and new names of the page to show that the page was renamed, and therefore counts as 2 towards a user's contributions count. If the page being moved had a talk page, which was renamed as well, that counts as 2 more, so a single move can add up to 4 to a user's contribution count, while it would add 0 to the server count. This explains to some extent why different edit counters will give different counts for the same user. (Note that counters which return contribution counts are generally heavy on the servers compared to counters which return server count, and so should be used infrequently.)

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