By request, here is an update for interested persons on the status of the
rewrite branch.
The major purpose of the rewrite branch is to implement a bot framework that
uses the new MediaWiki API (see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API for
details) instead of the old approach of scraping HTML wiki pages. Note that
many other potential areas for a rewrite have been suggested on this list,
and at
http://www.botwiki.sno.cc/wiki/Rewrite, but most of those are not
currently being pursued due to a lack of resources.
The software in the rewrite branch currently is runnable, but incomplete,
and with limited documentation. For the most part, the bot programming
interface is intended to be very similar to the interface used in the
current pywikipedia trunk, so that bot programs can be ported easily, but
there are significant changes that we have started to document in the file
README-conversion.txt. To date, most methods of the Page object that read
from the wiki have been implemented; you can, for example, instantiate a
Page object, get its text, and retrieve its templates, links, categories,
backlinks, and so forth (interwiki links other than language links are not
yet implemented). Methods that provide Site-wide lists of pages (allpages,
allcategories, randompages, etc.) have not yet been implemented, but this is
next on my to-do list. Most methods in the existing framework that
manipulate wiki text have not yet been ported (things like
replaceCategoryLinks), but these should require very few changes.
The ability to save changes to the wiki is *not* yet implemented. Note that
the MediaWiki API does now have the ability to edit pages, but this has not
yet been activated on any WMF wikis, so once editing is implemented in the
bot framework, it still will be of limited use.
At the moment, I am doing most of the development work on this branch.
Valhallasw contributed the http interface, nicdumz has contributed some
user-related methods, and although he has not contributed directly, I have
stolen^H^H^H^H^H^Hbeen inspired by some of Bryan Tong Minh's ideas from his
mwclient project. Let me make it clear that I do not consider this "my"
project by any means; anyone who is willing and able to contribute will be
most welcome. It may be helpful for any new contributors to announce which
aspects of the code they are planning to work on, to avoid duplication of
effort.
Russ