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.