Dear Pywikibot user,

The Wikimedia Foundation recently [1] pushed MediaWiki 1.24wmf2 to all sites. This version contains a change [2] which causes two problems:
   
    - For compat, bots will edit as anonymous user;
    - For core, bots will ask for a password at each script invocation.
   
This bug is tracked on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64727

A change fixing this bug [3] has been merged, but it has not been deployed yet. This should happen tomorrow, Monday, May 05, 15:00–16:00 UTC [4,5].

In the meanwhile, we suggest to not use compat until the fixed MediaWiki version has been deployed. For core, you can work around this bug by creating a password file, as documented at [6].

Best regards,
Merlijn and Maarten

   
[1] MediaWiki.org, testwiki, test2wiki and testwikidatawiki on 24 April 2014; All non-Wikipedia sites on 29 April 2014; All Wikipedias on 1 May 2014 ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/Roadmap#Schedule_for_the_deployments )
[2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94614/
[3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/131056/
[4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64727#c9
[5] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments
[6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/Use_on_third-party_wikis#Bot_doesn.27t_want_to_stay_logged_in