So while writing some methods for Wikidata, I discovered that locked wikis, deleted wikis, and renamed wikis all go into the same family.obsolete dict.
In fact, its impossible to create a site object for a closed wiki (both in trunk and rewrite):
>>> wikipedia.getSite('aa','wikipedia')
pywikibot.exceptions.NoSuchSite: Language aa in family wikipedia is obsolete
This isn't favorable behavior since it prevents read access as well, and write access for those who have it (stewards).
I wrote a quick patch for rewrite which separated this into three different groups: locked (readable but not writable), deleted (not readable), and "obsolete" (renamed wikis and backwards compatibility).
Trying to create a site for a locked wiki works fine, but will throw an error when you try to fetch an edit token. Creating a site for a deleted or obsolete wiki will throw the same error as before, just with a little bit more specific error message.
What do people think? This is a bit urgent since Wikidata support in trunk is broken because of it:
>>> wikipedia.DataPage(wikipedia.getSite('en','wikipedia'), 'Main Page').interwiki()
pywikibot.exceptions.NoSuchSite: Language ii in family wikipedia is obsolete
-- Legoktm