On 30 August 2016 at 22:46, Strainu <strainu10@gmail.com> wrote:

I also tried your method and indeed, it sees me as anonymous.

...

Perhaps pywikibot only sends the cookies when saving a page?

No, it should always send the cookies, but possibly the cookies are not saved or read correctly -- that would be a bug.

In any case, you can force the bot to log in by calling site.login(); that should give you the same behavior as edit-then-query.

Merlijn