Implementation notes

Most properties and generators accept the same parameters as the API, without their two-letter prefix. Some notable exceptions:

  • Image.imageinfo is the imageinfo of the latest image. Earlier versions can be fetched using imagehistory().

  • Site.all*: parameter (ap)from renamed to start

  • categorymembers is implemented as Category.members

  • deletedrevs is deletedrevisions

  • usercontribs is usercontributions

  • First parameters of search and usercontributions are search and user, respectively

Properties and generators are implemented as Python generators which yield one item per iteration. Their deprecated limit parameter is only an indication of the number of items retrieved from the API per request. It is not the total limit. Doing list(generator(limit = 50)) will return ALL items, not 50, but it will query the API in chunks of 50 items at a time (so after yielding one item from the generator, the next 49 will be “free”, then the next will trigger a new API call). The replacement api_chunk_size parameter does the same thing, but is more clearly named. If both limit and api_chunk_size are specified, limit will be ignored. The max_items parameter sets a total limit on the number of items which will be yielded. Use list(generator(max_items = 50)) to limit the amount of items returned to 50. Higher level functions that have a limit parameter also now have api_chunk_size and max_items parameters that should be preferred. Default API chunk size is generally the maximum chunk size (500 for most wikis).

Page objects

The base Page object is called Page and from that derive Category and Image. When the page is retrieved via Site.pages or a generator, it will check automatically which of those three specific types should be returned.

For convenience, Site.images and Site.categories are also provided. These do exactly the same as Site.Pages, except that they require the page name without its namespace prefixed.

>>> page = site.Pages['Template:Stub']   # a Page object
>>> image = site.Pages['Image:Wiki.png'] # an Image object
>>> image = site.Images['Wiki.png']      # the same Image object
>>> cat = site.Pages['Category:Python']  # a Category object
>>> cat = site.Images['Python']          # the same Category object