Timwi wrote:
I propose two small changes to MediaWiki, which would allow scripts and bots to parse the HTML output of MediaWiki more easily. (I'm crossposting this to wikitech-l and pywikipediabot-users, because it's relevant to both).
This sounds horribly redundant to me. I don't know how far the bot API effort has got (has any work on it been done at all?), but what you're proposing doesn't help it; it only adds bulk to the software.
I am, slowly. I'm focussing more on a client-side reader/editor rather than bots.
My effort includes things like Special:Getimage (redirects to the URL of the given image) and giving other special pages and XML output (so the data is easily parsed).
The second proposal is a pseudo-language, called "bot" or "none", that would cause MediaWiki to return system messages untranslated, in the form {@[key]@}.
I wrote such a feature before, but with the parameter &debugmsg=1 rather than as a "pseudo-language". It was live at some point, but apparently it's not anymore. Someone must have reverted it.
That is a feature I don't quite understand. Why would a bot want it? To simplify screen-scraping?
What about messages like [[MediaWiki:Sidebar]], which are not litterally pasted?
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