Much of update history missing

Email contribution was still available until 2008 (I have receipts), so perhaps those 2004 submissions were emails.

@Col_Needham​ 

There must have been some older records when you made the all-time top contributor lists?

@Peter_pbn​ Yes, but those are locked inside the database itself, stored with the data items and they cannot really be exported nor even easily extracted (and definitely not back-loaded into contribution histories).  We also cannot reconstruct the original contributions as made at the time anyway because those are all against the database exactly as it stood on the date the contribution was made (even the 2003-onwards history drifts out-of-sync in this respect).  As you note, each person's own email contribution receipts are the best way to track this from the early days. 

When we made the initial all-time list from (effectively) 1995-2015, that was generated from live items assigned to each account vs. from a true total of every edit.  We can and do track deletetions/corrections from the late 2000s onwards via a different logging mechanism, but we had to make the best guess from live items for those earlier years for the all-time list.  Since contributions were not centralised until April 1994, we have no records even in the database itself until the mid-90s.  All the filmography data I collected from 1981 to 1994 is in the database, but unallocated to me, which is why my profile badges are not a true reflection, especially the filmography total :-).

Hope this helps. 

Good to see you still monitoring the forums, Col.

I think, Col might have a red telephone in his bedroom, and it rings whenever the teams working for him require his assistance, because it seems like he is almost always monitoring the forum. Haha.

There isn't a chance that you still have your emails from back then?

Nope ::!