Page operations

Start by connecting to your site as described in the Connecting to your site section.

from mwclient import Site

user_agent = 'MyCoolTool/0.2 (xyz@example.org)'
site = Site('en.wikipedia.org', clients_useragent=user_agent)

For information about authenticating, please see the section on authenticating.

Editing or creating a page

To get the content of a specific page:

>>> page = site.pages['Greater guinea pig']
>>> text = page.text()

If a page doesn’t exist, Page.text() just returns an empty string. If you need to test the existence of the page, use page.exists:

>>> page.exists
True

Edit the text as you like before saving it back to the wiki:

>>> page.edit(text, 'Edit summary')

If the page didn’t exist, this operation will create it.

Listing page revisions

Page.revisions() returns a List object that you can iterate over using a for loop. Continuation is handled under the hood so you don’t have to worry about it.

Example: Let’s find out which users did the most number of edits to a page:

>>> users = [rev['user'] for rev in page.revisions()]
>>> unique_users = set(users)
>>> user_revisions = [{'user': user, 'count': users.count(user)} for user in unique_users]
>>> sorted(user_revisions, key=lambda x: x['count'], reverse=True)[:5]
[{'count': 6, 'user': 'Wolf12345'},
 {'count': 4, 'user': 'Test-bot'},
 {'count': 4, 'user': 'Mirxaeth'},
 {'count': 3, 'user': '192.251.192.201'},
 {'count': 3, 'user': '78.50.51.180'}]

Tip: If you want to retrieve a specific number of revisions, the itertools.islice method can come in handy:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> from time import mktime
>>> from itertools import islice
>>> for revision in islice(page.revisions(), 5):
...     dt = datetime.fromtimestamp(mktime(revision['timestamp']))
...     print(dt.strftime('%F %T'))

Categories

Categories can be retrieved in the same way as pages, but you can also use Site.categories() and skip the namespace prefix. The returned Category object supports the same methods as the Page object, but also provides an extra function, members(), to list all members of a category.

The Category object can also be used itself as an iterator to yield all its members:

>>> category = site.categories['Python']
>>> for page in category:
>>>     print(page.name)

Other page operations

There are many other page operations like backlinks(), embeddedin(), etc. See the API reference for more.