User:Edward Z. Yang/Wikipedia Bot in PHP

The Wikipedia Bot in PHP is meant to be an alternative to pywikipedia written in PHP. The Linkfix bot is built upon this incomplete framework.

Not all of us can read Python. Python is not especially well suited for creating web sites (can be done, but PHP was specifically created for that task!) Plus, I don't know how to write Python. All these factors meant we needed a Wikipedia Bot... in PHP.

I don't have plans for the bot to actually make writes. What it will do is parse Wikipedia pages and recombine the data in interesting ways. Some ideas I have:


 * 1) Personal Edit Tracking - The set of scripts will, in conjunction with your watchlist, allow you to set edits as "unread." As edits are made, they are cached, and then, after a weeks vacation, will present them in a readable digest for you, listing the diffs of all the changes. You can then mark that particular set of diffs as read, and then it won't show up on your homepage.
 * 2) Watchlist... Recent Changes style - Show all recent edits for the page on your watchlist, not just the most recent one.
 * 3) Watchlist Scraper - Sometimes Wikipedia's just really slow. Wouldn't be nice if your computer automatically grabbed the contents of your watchlist every few minutes so that a (slightly stale but fast) copy could be displayable? I have this implemented locally, and am only wondering how to packaged it.
 * 4) Talk Page Parser - Take information from talk pages and parse them into bulletin board format. Allows you to easily follow conversations on busy talk pages.
 * 5) Link checkers - Click through every link on a page and then see if they're redirects or disambiguation pages. Return easy to read text file to aid in the correction of these links (LinkFix bot).
 * 6) Elementary wikitext parsing - Yes, Parser.php is pretty terrible. Some of the stuff's not that difficult to do though, right?

Of course, much of this hasn't been coded yet. But I do have some usable tools.

Some source code
For the interested. Probably not very useful. Probably stale too.