Perlwikibot/Overview

Perlwikibot
Original author(s)	ST47
Developer(s)	The Perlwikibot team
Initial release	August 25, 2007
Stable release	5.5.7 / Nov 2013
Written in	Perl
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://perlwikipedia.googlecode.com

What is this thing?

Perlwikibot is a bot framework, similar to Pywikibot, except it's written in Perl.

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

Of course not! Pywikibot is a valuable bot framework (the Tawkerbot2 code, as well as most major bots, are 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?

Perlwikibot is almost completely cross-wiki, so you can write bots for virtually any MediaWiki wiki with it. As of version 5.005007, Perlwikibot does not support WikiData-specific queries or edits.

Editing and querying wikis

Retrieve the wikitext of articles, sections, and old revisions
Edit pages
Retrieve the history of articles
Revert to old revisions of articles (manually, with undo, or with rollback)
Retrieve the Recent Changes log
Retrieve backlinks and transclusions
Purge page caches
Retrieve a listing of all pages in a category
Run linksearches

Admin functions

Deleting and undeleting pages
Blocking and unblocking users
Protecting and unprotecting pages
Performing transwiki imports (XML upload is in the works)

Installation

The latest stable version can be installed from CPAN:

user@host:~$ cpan
cpan> install MediaWiki::Bot
...

Or download from [1] and install it like you would any other Perl module:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install

Development versions

The latest unstable source code can be acquired from the github repo.

 git clone https://github.com/MediaWiki-Bot/MediaWiki-Bot.git

Unlike pywikibot, we do not recommend using the unstable source tree for production.

Who wrote perlwikibot?

perlwikibot is maintained by ST47, Shadow1, Jmax-, Oleg Alexandrov, and Mike.lifeguard.

Can I help?

Sure! Check out the OpenHatch page for ways to get started, or jump into the list of issues and start hacking!