R: Retrieve user information

user_information {WikipediR} | R Documentation

## Retrieve user information

### Description

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

### Usage

    user_information(language = NULL, project = NULL, domain = NULL,
      user_names, properties = c("blockinfo", "groups", "implicitgroups",
      "rights", "editcount", "registration", "emailable", "gender"),
      clean_response = FALSE, ...)

### Arguments

`language` | The language code of the project you wish to query, if appropriate.
`project` | The project you wish to query ("wikiquote"), if appropriate. Should be provided in conjunction with `language`.
`domain` | as an alternative to a `language` and `project` combination, you can also provide a domain ("rationalwiki.org") to the URL constructor, allowing for the querying of non-Wikimedia MediaWiki instances.
`user_names` | 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 be performed for the first 50 names in the vector.
`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 inheritance, as a result of membership in other groups), "rights" (what permissions their group membership grants them), "editcount" (how many non-deleted edits they have), "registration" (the date when they registered), "emailable" (whether they are contactable through Special:EmailUser) and "gender" (their provided gender).
`clean_response` | whether to do some basic sanitising of the resulting data structure. Set to FALSE by default.
`...` | further arguments to pass to httr's GET.

### Warnings

There are a few caveats with the data provided by `user_information`, mostly stemming from 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.

### See Also

`user_contributions` for retrieving recent contributions made by a particular user.

### Examples

    #Retrieving information from a Wikimedia project
    user_info <- user_information("en", "wikipedia", user_names = "David Gerard",
                                 properties = "registration")

    #Non-Wikimedia projects
    user_info <- user_information(domain = "rationalwiki.org", user_names = "David Gerard",
                                 properties = "registration")

[Package WikipediR version 1.5.0 Index]