Professional Wikis

Chapter 10. The MediaWiki API

The ability to interact with MediaWiki through an application programming interface is an evolving feature. In this chapter, you will learn about bots, programs used to automate certain administrative tasks on MediaWiki, as well as the MediaWiki API, which is currently in development and is intended to provide a programming interface to MediaWiki so that external applications can interact with it.

Both the section on bots and the section on the API make extensive use of examples written in the Python programming language. Even if you do not know Python, you will be able to learn a lot about how bots and the API work, which you can use to develop scripts in your language of choice. With respect to the API, all interaction is managed through URLs, so you don't even have to write any script to see samples of the API output; simply type the URL in your browser and see what is returned.

Bots: pywikipedia.py

In MediaWiki parlance, a bot is a script or program that is used to perform some administrative task in support of a wiki. There is a special group called bot, so any bot that is used with MediaWiki must have a username that is in the bot group. A person with bureaucrat privileges is required to set the appropriate permissions.

The reason for requiring a special username is twofold. One, you do not want people to be able to automate tasks willy-nilly with your wiki. That's just asking for trouble from spammers and trolls. At the same time, tedious or time-consuming ...