Rewrite/Page

There are multiple ways of handling page edits. I have several proposals:

Contents 1 Old style 1.1 Advantages 1.2 Disadvantages 2 Get/Setter style 2.1 Advantages 2.2 Disadvantages 3 Comments

Old style

• preload using page.preload(<api data>)
• load using page.text(), page.templatelinks() etc

  and throwing warnings when not using preloaded data

• editing text locally
• save using page.put(text, comment)

Advantages

• Completely thread-safe, but may give edit conflicts by the bot to itself

Disadvantages

• Lots of seperate functions that essentially do the same thing
• Duplication of functions and variables (for every templatelinks() function, there is a templatelinks variable)

Get/Setter style

• preload using page.preload(<api data>)
• using page.text, page.templatelinks, which are simple loader functions

  and throwing warnings when not using preloaded data

• editing page.text

  editing page.templatelinks would yield a ReadOnlyException or sth.

• saving using page.save(comment), which saves page.text to the site.

Advantages

• Reduces code duplication in Page class
• Bidirectional way of using the Page variables -> better 'simulation' of the page editing window
• Multiple edits can be done by seperate functions without first writing to the site; e.g.:

 page.preload(...)
 replace_wikilinks(page)
 do_other_replacements(page)
 page.save('replaced wikilinks and other replacements')

would give one edit, while the current system would either yield two edits or the first edit function would be ignored (unless you throw around the text instead of the page object)

• No duplicate variables/functions

Disadvantages

• Less thread safe (i.e. two functions editing the same Page object *at the same time* in two different threads)
  • this issue could be addressed by adding an explict mutex/lock to the Page object

Comments

• Neither one of these proposals is compatible with the existing Pywikipediabot API; my preference is to minimize the work that bot authors/operators have to do to convert existing scripts to the rewrite. However, I would prefer the getter/setter style be used in the "back-end" for the reasons suggested by Valhallasw above. Russ Blau