Flow will start appearing more widely soon when we release a feature to
allow users on certain wikis to opt into Flow on their user talk pages.
The most common thing you'll probably want to do on a Flow page is post
a new topic.
For Pywikibot, that is pretty easy, since they have Flow support now.
See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/Flow .
For on-wiki scripts, you can use MessagePoster (you don't need to know
if it's a Flow board ahead of time!):
---
var title = new mw.Title( 'titleString' );
var posterPromise = mw.messagePoster.factory.create( title );
posterPromise.done( function ( poster ) {
poster.post( 'This is the topic title', 'This is the body of a message
posted with MessagePoster' );
} );
---
Depend on 'mediawiki.messagePoster' and 'mediawiki.Title'.
In some cases, you might want to check if a link is already there (e.g.
to see if a warning template already included links to a particular
policy). You can use prop=links for this.
Flow is based on an infinitely-scrollable list of topics, each of which
is its own page. So to use prop=links, you may need to loop through a
set of recent enough topics (e.g. 25) then combine them into a
prop=links request, e.g.
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Topic:Sojpiv245cuiw…
.
pywikibot has support for looping through topics.
Some bots need to check the header of a page for wikitext (e.g. a bot
exclusion template). This can be done with view-header, but I don't
think pywikibot has support for that yet (but it can be done directly).
See
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=flow&format=jsonfm&page=Talk%3AF…
.
A better way to do this would be templatelinks, but I'm not sure if
there is an API to show templates PageX transcludes.
For other questions, contact us at #wikimedia-collaboration . Or, if a
certain tool needs Flow support and you're not sure where to start, you
can file a bug (you can also reply here, but a ping in IRC would be
appreciated).
Matt Flaschen
Perhaps interesting to those who see opportunities for gamification on
Wikipedia projects.
"Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and
incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this
gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and
explains how."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBesGYM
Pine