Are there any F/OSS projects that provide such functionality without requiring screen-scraping?
No, although the best-maintained screen-scraping product is pywikipediabot, it has many of the functions you want.
I'll look into it... though Python isn't really an option for now. I'm using PHP.
Failing *that*, does documentation exist that explains MW's DB schema so I can begin to write my own?
Oh, so you want to rewrite it in some other language? Have fun, the documentation is in tables.sql.
Thanks.
Not so much another language, but I am looking for a way to access the information in a slightly more "encapsulated" way. From my research so far, it seems that MW makes heavy use of many globals & singletons ($wgUser, $wgArticle, etc.), so keeping track of each function's side effects is ... challenging. :)
Trying not to reinvent too much of the wheel here.
I'm using the current-stable version, 1.4.9, if that matters.
You should probably upgrade to 1.5, 1.4.x will be obsolete soon.
Will do.
---------------------------------------------------------------- michal migurski- mike@stamen.com 415.558.1610