Hello all.

I would like to suggest a few features that would mal life easier for people who develop bots and other tools that access the wikipedia and also reduce traffic from such tools. I belive those to be fairly easy to implement.

In case some of the features already exist, I aplogize - I didn't find any information about it (to be honstest, I don't even know where to look in the first place).

The idea is to have an optionaly URL-Parameter like "format=", that would tell the software to return a page in a format different from the full-fledged HTML. I would like to suggest formats for "real" pages and special pages separately, as the requirements are different.

For articles, discussion-pages, etc, support the following formats:

* source - return the wiki-source of that page * text - return a plain text version, with all markup striped/replaced (tables, text boxes, etc do not have to be formatd nicely, but their content should be returned)

For special pages and all automatically generated lists (kategories, changes, watchlist, whatlinkshere, etc):

* csv - return the list in CSV-format * rss - return entries in the list as RSS items.

Additionally, for the normal "full html" view, provide a switch "plain" that supresses all sidebars, etc and shows just the formated text.

As to the implementation, I would suggest to map the format-name to the name of a php-class and load it on demand. That way, now formats can be supported by just placing an appropriate file in the php lib-path.

Shall I submit a feature request to the wikizilla regarding this? What do you think?

Thank you for your attention, Daniel