Hi all

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).

The first proposal is a minimal skin that adds only the absolutely necessary HTML around the article content. This would remove a lot of overhead for bots (in terms of parsing and loading), and meight also be handy for people using a PDA or cell phone to browse a wiki; This way, server load would also be reduced (a little). Here's the feature request (patch included): http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3651

The second proposal is a pseudo-language, called "bot" or "none", that would cause MediaWiki to return system messages untranslated, in the form {@[key]@}. This way, system messages can be regognized and parsed easily - no need to deal with different languages, or with people changing the message. This would also save some effort on the server side (no need to look into the database for messages). Here's the feature request (patch included): http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3652

Hint: you can force a specific skin and language to be used by adding uselang=bla (resp. useskin=bla) to the URL. This also works without logging in.

Both patches are not intended to replace a full featured bot API. They are simple hacks that can be applied without much pain. Bots would only need minimal changes to be able to use those features. Much breakage due to changin system messages could be avoided that way, for instance.

Please give some feedback. If you like my proposals, please comment in bugzilla, so we may actually get this running on Wikimedia's servers soon.

Cheers, Daniel