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
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http://brightbyte.de