[the mail I'm replying to contained only an image]
Hallo John:
I'm not sure why you expect that checkout to work: [0] clearly says
(note the "--recursive" part). Your checkout will obviously not work if
you don't check the "recursive" checkbox. The alternative to getting a
working checkout is doing a non-recursive clone and then doing
git submodule update --init
as described in the README file at [1].
[0]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikipediabot/Installation#Download_…
[1]
https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/pywikibot%2Fcore.git/cd5716cdd06a8347212c63c…
--
Wieland