Timwi wrote:
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.
I am, slowly. I'm focussing more on a client-side reader/editor rather
than bots.
My effort includes things like Special:Getimage (redirects to the URL of
the given image) and giving other special pages and XML output (so the
data is easily parsed).
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.
That is a feature I don't quite understand. Why would a bot want it? To
simplify screen-scraping?
What about messages like [[MediaWiki:Sidebar]], which are not litterally
pasted?
-- Jamie
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