This one seems to be harder than I thought it would be. It turns out GitLab doesn't really have the same level of indexing that GitHub has. The procedure for GitHub is we search for every commit that a user has across all repos in the @wikimedia organization, so that we get a full scan of everyone's commits, regardless of time. Unfortunately, commit searching is unavailable without Advanced search, which is only available on GitLab Premium when running GitLab Self-Managed. Of course, this means we don't have that functionality. An alternative is that we could provide historical data by directly targeting /merge_requests, etc. to search for merge requests by a specific user. Unfortunately, this requires a GitLab account with administrator access, so that's also a no-go. I thought about scanning commits of the projects that a user is a member of, but seeing the memberships of a user also requires administrator access (so we can't have something like Gerrit where we show a user's group memberships).

The last resort I can think of is showing user events, which is practically the only thing we can get from the API that doesn't require administrator access or GitLab Premium. The caveat is that we can only show activity events up to 3 years old due to a time period limit. It's better than nothing, but not the best. I'll add a special note to inform users that they may have more contributions past 3 years. It'd be great if I can show this notice only for GitLab accounts that have existed past 3 years but... well... that's also locked behind administrator access.