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).
This sounds horribly redundant to me. I don't know how far the bot API
effort has got (has any work on it been done at all?), but what you're
proposing doesn't help it; it only adds bulk to the software.
The second proposal is a pseudo-language, called
"bot" or "none", that
would cause MediaWiki to return system messages untranslated, in the
form {@[key]@}.
I wrote such a feature before, but with the parameter &debugmsg=1 rather
than as a "pseudo-language". It was live at some point, but apparently
it's not anymore. Someone must have reverted it.
Timwi