Thread:Mathmagician/@comment-4795804-20120923193038/@comment-5209426-20121010131903

Sorry, looks like this was a dead-end as well.

I just went and looked at the source code and it appears there isn't any way around this. Special:Editcount writes directly to the HTML feed instead of returning its data to the parser. The reason none of this is working is because, as far as the parser is concerned, Special:Editcount always returns blank since it only writes directly to the output.

This is by design (so that JS and CSS can be written directly by things like ) so there isn't any way around this AFAICT. It seems you're going to need an alternative solution to your problem. [Editcount should really define a normal parser function instead of being an includable special page, but it isn't so you're stuck. There is mw:Extension:MW-EditCount which is actually older than the current EditCount and does provide a parser function which would work here, but that extension is discontinued and broken so we're stuck with the newer, lamer one.]

I've got to go now, but we can pick this up later if you want to ask me something else.