The AssertEdit extension has long been installed on WMF wikis,
allowing bots to include "&assert=user" or "&assert=bot" in
their
action=edit requests to prevent accidentally editing while logged out.
With Gerrit change 90263,[1] the functionality will be included in
MediaWiki core. At the same time, the following changes will be made
to the functioning of this feature:
* Assertion will be available on all API actions, not just edit.
* Assertion failure will now be indicated by an API error, code
'assertbotfailed' or 'assertuserfailed'.
* The 'nassert' parameter will be ignored, and using it will give an
unrecognized parameter warning.
* Other assertions, such as 'true', 'false', and 'exists', will
no
longer function and attempting to use them will result in an
'unknown_assert' error.
Most clients should notice little change from this transition besides
the fact of receiving an error rather than a failure status from
action=edit.
This change will be rolled out with 1.23wmf10, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/Roadmap for the
schedule.
[1]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/90263/
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation