WikiRobots

Overview
Repetitive tasks can be automated using Robots, i.e. software programs operating on the Wiki.

The natural and most used Robots for Wiki sites are provided by Wikipedia, under the name of Pywikibot.

In a nutshell, the Pywikibot is a collection of Python scripts able to use the native Wiki API to act on the Wiki sites (to see for instance the API list for FreeCAD Wiki, select this link http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/api.php).

In order to use the Pywikibot, you need to:


 * 1) install the Pywikibot
 * 2) configure the Pywikibot to work on the FreeCAD Wiki
 * 3) launch the script(s) you need for the task at hand

There is a wealth of information on how to install, configure and use the Pywikibot. However, please be aware that this information, although useful, can be highly misleading, since it is mixing instructions related to two different Pywikibot codebases, and different versions of the Pywikibot scripts collection.

In the following, you will find the basic instructions to set up and use Pywikibot on FreeCAD wiki. This will allow you to perform most of the tasks. For more detailed information and advanced usage, you'll have eventually to refer to the Pywikibot manual and, even better, to the Python source code / source code comments.

Installation
Go to http://tools.wmflabs.org/pywikibot/ and download (the project is also under github, gerrit, etc. but this is a simple way to get a full self-contained package).

Unzip the content in your preferred directory.

Unless you want to install the libraries into your Python libs, you are done.

Pywikibot works with Python 2.6 and 2.7 with no issues. Python 3 has been not tested so far with FreeCAD wiki.

Configuration
You must save the following Python code as a file with the name in the base directory where you unzipped  (to be clear, in the same directory where you already find a file called ).

In the above code:


 * replace <> with your Wiki user name
 * replace cp437 with your console_encoding. To find out what is your console encoding, for Windows and Linux, launch the Python interpreter, enter followed by . Python will write your  on the screen.

Then you must save the following Python code as a file with the name under the sub-directory  (together with the other  files).