What is this thing?

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

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

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?

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?

See the Perlwikipedia project page at Google Code.

The latest, bleeding-edge code is available by running this command (assuming you have SVN installed):

svn checkout http://perlwikipedia.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ perlwikipedia ^{[ dead link]}

This is the recommended method, as it allows the user to quickly update their copy of the code by running svn up.

If you want a stable release, see the Downloads section of the Google Code page, or run this SVN command:

svn checkout http://perlwikipedia.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.0/ perlwikipedia-1.0.

Who wrote perlwikipedia?

perlwikipedia is maintained by ST47, Shadow1, Jmax-, and Oleg Alexandrov.

Can I help?

Sure! Just leave a message on ST47'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

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