Ability to sort answers by number of revisions via StackExchange API v2?

Question

I was curious whether there was a way to easily find which StackOverflow answer has the highest number of revisions and/or to sort by that metric.

I see mention of a sort function in the StackExchange API v2 docs, but nothing about sorting answers by their associated revision count, so I'm assuming that it isn't possible?

It probably isn't a good idea to provide this to everyone via the UI, because it might encourage some to revise their answers many times just to top the chart. But, I was curious about how one answer might rank among others in this regard, and maybe it would be of interest to others.

Answer 1

This isn't possible and isn't likely to be added.

Post history is by a good clip the largest chunk of data in the system. Regularly sorting by it would be prohibitively expensive on the sites themselves, much less in the API.

For queries like this, we have data.stackexchange. Here's a query for the most "revised" post on a site. We also provide data dumps (http://www.clearbits.net/torrents/2076-aug-2012 is the latest; we're switching how we do those, a new one should be out soon) for queries that are too resource intensive.