If you discover any bugs, please enter them into the bug tracker or list them at /Bugs.

What is this thing? edit

perlwikipedia is a bot framework, similar to pywikipedia, except it's written in Perl.

Does that mean you're trying to make pywikipedia obsolete? edit

Of course not! Pywikipedia is a valuable bot framework (the Tawkerbot2 code, as well as most major bots, is written using it), however, if Perl coders are confined to using Python, they can't customize and extend the code to fit their needs. With an open-source framework written in their "native language," they'll be able to better write bots in a language that they are comfortable with, and even customize the framework to fit needs it wasn't originally imagined for.

How complete is perlwikipedia? edit

perlwikipedia is currently able to:

  • Retrieve the wikitext of articles.
  • Edit pages
  • Retrieve revision ids of articles.
  • Retrieve the history of articles.
  • Revert to old revisions of articles.
  • Retrieve the Recent Changes log.
  • Perform What links here functions.
  • Purge page caches
  • Retrieve a listing of all pages in a category
  • Run linksearches

In addition, perlwikipedia is almost completely cross-wiki, so you can write bots for virtually any MediaWiki wiki with it.

Where can I get this? edit

See the Perlwikipedia pages page at CPAN.

Who wrote perlwikipedia? edit

perlwikipedia is maintained by Shadow1, Jmax-, and Oleg Alexandrov.

Can I help? edit

Sure! Just leave a message on Shadow1's talk page, and he'll get in touch with you. Please note that developers of perlwikipedia must have Google Code accounts in order to commit changes to SVN.

Upcoming features edit

  • Support for (gasp) administrative tools, such as deleting/restoring pages and blocking users.

See also edit

Another perl-written framework is MediaWiki::Bot.