mitmproxy is a tool that allows you to sniff network traffic -- which is incredibly useful for debugging pywikibot network issues. Of course, there are other tools to do this (e.g. ethereal), but those are not usable anymore now that the WMF switched to HTTPS. In addition, mitmproxy allows you to /manipulate/ the traffic, which can be useful for tricking pywikibot into thinking there are network issues.

This weekend, I finally got mitmproxy to work for pywikibot/core -- the version available in ubuntu did not correctly forge SSL certificates yet. For other interested developers, I put up a guide at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pywikibot/mitmproxy

Unfortunately, the internet seems to suggest it doesn't work that well for Windows users. http://honeyproxy.org/ is supposed to be better, but I haven't tested it.

Merlijn