Manual:Pywikibot/Overview

Pywikibot is a Python library and collection of tools that automate work on MediaWiki sites. Originally designed for Wikipedia, it is now used throughout the Wikimedia Foundation's projects and on many other MediaWiki wikis.

The project started in 2002 and is currently on version 2.0rc4.

Which Pywikibot should you use?

The better choice is the core release of Pywikibot, formerly known as the rewrite branch.

It features several improvements, such as full  usage, and is much more up-to-date with new MediaWiki features and a Pythonic package layout.

It works with installations of  or higher.

There is also a compat release (formerly 'trunk') available, which is old and largely based on scraping>Special:MyLanguage/Web scraping access|screen-scraping.

It supports older versions of MediaWiki.

The Pywikibot community man>Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Pywikibot/Compat/deprecation|strongly recommends that you use core instead of compat.

The table below may assist in choosing between the compat and core releases.

Requirements for a bot
Pywikibot supports Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux when used with a compatible version of Python.

It should also work on any other operating system that has a compatible version of Python installed.

To check whether you have Python installed and to find its version, just type "python" at the CMD or shell prompt.

See the table below to determine if a compatible version of Python has been installed.

License
Here you can view the LICENSE files for [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/PWBC/browse/master/LICENSE core] and [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/PWBO/browse/master/LICENSE compat].

Other licenses

 * pywikibot/userinterfaces/win32_unicode.py is based on code that is CC BY-SA 3.0.


 * pywikibot/backports.py consists of code from PSF, and is licensed PSF 2.0.