Users of full database downloads (known colloquially as "dumps") of Wikimedia content will be pleased to know that a full schedule of dumps has restarted after certain problems were fixed. These problems had caused XML dumps from several projects, including the English Wikipedia, to have inconsistencies or missing text. Dumps provide an offline backup of the content of Wikipedia and other projects, and can also be used in preference to "live" data for research and more complicated full-text queries.
Ideas and thoughts about unifying the many different frameworks written for bots in the programming language PHP have resurfaced at the bot operators' noticeboard. The idea is to parallel a similar framework written in Python, pywikipediabot, which has achieved a significant level of use among the MediaWiki/Python community. Anyone with experience of coding bots in PHP – or with any thoughts of how best to achieve the "holy grail" of a common backbone for PHP-based bots – is invited to comment.
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