There are couple of aspects to this. None is a null value explicitly different from 0. Because we're trying our best to pull in data via a couple of different interfaces that don't always give us data, we'll never live in a world where we don't see that sometimes. We should probably make that None more informative. Basically, apps shouldn't be declined due to a null value in the system, instead the coordinator should check the link right next to that value that will often show a correct edit count. I'll also work on figuring out why we don't have data for those folks specifically.

Cause of null data resolved, but the user edit counts won't get updated until the impacted users login again. As @Samwalton9 suggested, it was an encoding issue: the input data fed into the user import code as well as the test code are already utf-8. The OAuth data coming back from live wikimedia was being treated as ANSI. Changes pushed to production.