[Wikipedia-l] Python Wikipediabot release

Fri Apr 23 10:22:14 UTC 2004

I have added a new release of the Python Wikipediabot package, it can be
found at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93107&package_id=98691 .

There are now several packages in the release, but if you download
pywikipediabot.zip, you don't need to worry about the others, as they
are only parts of it, containing the files necessary for specific uses
of the bot.

Changes to the bot since my previous message on April 6:

* A new bot, windows_chars.py, has been included, changing windows characters
  that are not in Latin-1 into their HTML-encoding. It is advisable to use
  this bot (or another one with the same working, developped by Looxix) before
  switching a Wikipedia from Latin-1 to UTF-8.
* When using the bot to transfer images from one Wikipedia to another, the
  image description page of the language the image is taken from is used as
  the base for a default description. Also, this bot now is able to handle
  redirect pages.
* When the interwiki-bot finds links to different pages on the same language,
  those are first given to the user to decide on, rather than having them
  mixed up with languages for which just one page was found. Also, the options
  to 'say yes to all' and 'give up' have been included
* Several bugs in the uploading of images have been repaired.
* boilerplate.py now can also be used to change {{msg:...}}-messages
  into written-out messages (using {{subst:...}})
* The table copying and translating bot has had several bug repairs and minor
  improvements. It now works for French departments.
* The bot now handles localized redirect text (for the moment that includes
  only the #ail-cyfeirio for cy:)

Discussed in recent weeks but not implemented are:
* Creating localization information to enable the bot to be used on wikitravel
  (or other WikiMedia-projects)
* Creating a bot to add redirects of the "Sometown, KY" to "Sometown, Kentucky"
  kind
* Further changes to make things easier on the operator when the interwiki-bot
  has a problem that it cannot solve by itself

Andre Engels