question hey i saw that you were an administrator here so i was just wondering if you might be able to answer a question i had the thing is i'm an admin on a different wiki and another admin on the same wiki posted a question to the rest of the admins asking if there was a url that can be used to show any user their current number of edits on the wiki on our wiki there's a page called special editcount that conveys that information i don't think wikipedia has a page like this though so another admin advised him to use this url that url would achieve the desired result but one would have to constantly put the username of the specific user at the end of the url when posting it on that user's talk page so my goal was to come up with a way to avoid that almost to create something you could post on any user's talk page without changing any part of it and still get the desired result i came up with this fullurl special editcount basepagename this way one could just post the coding on the talk page of the desired user and the returned url would automatically direct the user to their respective edit count this worked successfully for every other user whose talk page i tested the coding on without saving the page of course the only problem is that the user he wanted to do this for has an both at the beginning and the end of their username the second asterisk isn't a problem just the first meaning that instead of being returned as it gets returned as fullurl special editcount user and doesn't take anyone anywhere because it's just the raw coding so i was just wondering if you knew of any way to circumvent this problem aside from just telling him to post on the user's talk page which isn't the end of the world but is of course what i was trying to get around in the first place maybe by putting some other form of coding that i'm not aware of somewhere in the existing coding or something any light you may be able to shed on this problem would be greatly appreciated thanks