Pywikibot

The Pywikibot framework is a Python library that interfaces with the MediaWiki API version 1.27 or higher.

Also included are various general function scripts that can be adapted for different tasks.

For further information about the library excluding scripts see the full code documentation.

Quick start

pip install requests
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/pywikibot/core.git
cd core
git submodule update --init
python pwb.py script_name

Or to install using PyPI (excluding scripts)

pip install -U setuptools
pip install pywikibot
pwb <scriptname>

Our installation guide has more details for advanced usage.

Basic Usage

If you wish to write your own script it's very easy to get started:

import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site('en', 'wikipedia')  # The site we want to run our bot on
page = pywikibot.Page(site, 'Wikipedia:Sandbox')
page.text = page.text.replace('foo', 'bar')
page.save('Replacing "foo" with "bar"')  # Saves the page

Wikibase Usage

Wikibase is a flexible knowledge base software that drives Wikidata. A sample pywikibot script for getting data from Wikibase:

import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site('wikipedia:en')
repo = site.data_repository()  # the Wikibase repository for given site
page = repo.page_from_repository('Q91')  # create a local page for the given item
item = pywikibot.ItemPage(repo, 'Q91')  # a repository item
data = item.get()  # get all item data from repository for this item

Script example

Pywikibot provides bot classes to develop your own script easily:

import pywikibot
from pywikibot import pagegenerators
from pywikibot.bot import ExistingPageBot

class MyBot(ExistingPageBot):

    update_options = {
        'text': 'This is a test text',
        'summary': 'Bot: a bot test edit with Pywikibot.'
    }

    def treat_page(self):
        """Load the given page, do some changes, and save it."""
        text = self.current_page.text
        text += '\n' + self.opt.text
        self.put_current(text, summary=self.opt.summary)

def main():
    """Parse command line arguments and invoke bot."""
    options = {}
    gen_factory = pagegenerators.GeneratorFactory()
    # Option parsing
    local_args = pywikibot.handle_args(args)  # global options
    local_args = gen_factory.handle_args(local_args)  # generators options
    for arg in local_args:
        opt, sep, value = arg.partition(':')
        if opt in ('-summary', '-text'):
            options[opt[1:]] = value
    MyBot(generator=gen_factory.getCombinedGenerator(), **options).run()

if __name == '__main__':
    main()

For more documentation on Pywikibot see our docs.

Roadmap

Release history

See https://github.com/wikimedia/pywikibot/blob/stable/HISTORY.rst

Contributing

Our code is maintained on Wikimedia's Gerrit installation, learn how to get started.