It was recently noticed[1] that the xmldoublequote parameter to format=xml has been broken since r55641,[2] merged in August 2009 and released with MediaWiki 1.16. Since it has been broken for over 3.5 years, it was decided to just remove the parameter.[3]

Background: The xmldoublequote parameter was added in response to bug 11401,[4] as a workaround for the fact that XPath 1.0 did not specify any mechanism for escaping quotes in string literals. It caused all attribute values and text content to be double-encoded, e.g. a double quote would be represented as ", and an ampersand would be represented as &.

Workaround: XPath 2.0, released in 2007, does include a quoting mechanism. Clients using XPath 1.0 may use string concatenation as a workaround.[5]

[1]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46626 [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/55641 [3]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/58261/ [4]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11401 [5]: e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6937525/escaping-xpath-literal-with-pytho...