[Mediawiki-api] write API "edit conflict"

[Brad Jorsch]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 08:49:48AM +1200, Jim Tittsler wrote:
> On 17/07/09 16:18, Dan Collins wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Jim Tittsler<jt at onnz.net>  wrote:
> >> I have a bot (using mwclient 0.6.2) that nightly updates some status
> >> pages on WikiEducator.org.  It has suddenly started failing with an
> >> 'Edit conflict' but I can edit the page by hand and the script continues
> >> to write to another page.  Are there things that would prohibit the API
> >> from writing to a page but still allow editing through the wiki?
> >
> > Yes. Specifically, an edit conflict will cause one attempt to fail and
> > the next to succeed with no problem. For details see
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_conflict but essentially
> > someone else changed the page while you were editing it and the wiki
> > wants you to make sure you don't accidentally overwrite their changes.
> 
> I think there is something else going on.  Writing to this particular 
> page now *always* fails through the API.  It always succeeds when I edit 
> through the web.  The history of the page says only the bot and my test 
> edits have been performed on the page.  The bot continues to write to 
> other pages.  Are there other conditions that get reported as edit 
> conflicts?

Are you correctly supplying both the basetimestamp and starttimestamp
parameters to the action=edit call?