Manual:Pywikibot/Overview/en

The Python MediaWiki Robot Framework (Pywikibot) is a collection of tools made to help users write and run "bots", which help maintain and contribute to Wikipedia by automating common and tedious tasks. You can also use Pywikibot to contribute to other Wikimedia wikis, and on other MediaWiki websites. 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 API usage, and is much more up-to-date with new MediaWiki features and a Pythonic package layout. It works with installations of MediaWiki version 1.14 or higher.

There is also a compat release (formerly 'trunk') available, which is old and largely based on screen-scraping. It supports older versions of MediaWiki.

The Pywikibot community 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
To run a bot on your wiki, you will need shell access to your hosting account, and be running Python 2 (normally 2.7.2 or higher) or Python 3 (normally 3.3 or higher). If you don't know whether you have shell access, ask your hosting provider. To check whether you have Python installed and to find its version, just type "python" at the shell prompt.

License
Here you can view the LICENSE files for core and 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.