"Bryan Tong Minh" bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:

On Nov 5, 2007 9:27 PM, Russell Blau russblau@imapmail.org wrote:

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"Merlijn van Deen" valhallasw@arctus.nl wrote:

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This really is not a seperate point, but it is important. I think we should use the API where possible, but having a fallback to the monobook html parser.

Absolutely. The API doesn't do everything that you can do with HTML (yet), and if we want backwards compatibility we have to remember that the API has changed a lot between MW versions.

Branching is the key. The trunk should always be in sync with the trunk of MediaWiki. Additionally each time a MediaWiki version is released, the trunk should be forked into a compatible branch.

I also don't see the point of providing a fall back to HTML scraping, except when absolutely necessary.

This raises an important question. Do we want to continue trying to support every MediaWiki installation, including those that haven't upgraded to more recent versions of MW? There are a number of wikis in the families/ directory now that don't have any API support at all.

Personally, I only use my bots on Wikimedia Foundation sites, so it's not an issue for me. But it may be for others. If we decide to go API-only, then users of the non-current MediaWiki installations will have to use the "old" pywikipediabot.

Russ