Topic on User talk:KBach-WMF/Collections/PywikibotCollection/Analysis

I think pywikibot documentation has three different kinds of audience.

• pywikibot developers who write Python code
• bot operators who run scripts based on pywikibot and may not write Python
• other on-wiki people who might interact with bots based on pywikibit and who are generally not classified as developers in any sense

The current content of https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/stable is mostly for the first two. It's a site for developers, after all.

For the last, we have pages like Manual:Pywikibot/archivebot.py/setup (or maybe it's the only page, I don't know). If the proposed deprecation of MW.org pages happens, where should it go?

I agree with your classification which is also reflected by the Manual:Pywikibot in (different order): Running a bot, Writing a bot, Developing Pywikibot. Also the documentation has these three areas:

• https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/stable/#for-bot-users
• https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/stable/#for-bot-developers
• https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/stable/#for-framework-developers

The Manual:Pywikibot/archivebot.py/setup is more for the bot owners because a script is used which is shipped with Pywikibot framework. Unfortunately the page is outdated, see Archivebot Script Description. The advantage of doc.wikimedia.org is that any code changes can be found there immediatly. The advantage of mw.org is to publish some how-tos which aren't part of the doc.wikimedia.org doc (yet).

Thanks for your question. Perhaps I should try to clarify this in the proposal, but I'm not suggesting a big deprecation of content on mediawiki.org. I expect that most of the pages will stay where they are, and only some outdated materials will be marked as deprecated.

What I want to do instead is to make sure that the content on MW.org is more helpful and easier to use by these on-wiki people and bot users with less technical expertise. On the other hand, I think it's also important to provide links to some materials on doc.wikimedia.org for people interested in more technical details. That said, any deprecation would only apply to materials that are outdated and duplicate content from elsewhere.

For the page you are specifically asking about: for now I would leave it where it is. In the mid-term, I would want to make sure it's visible in the documentation structure alongside other materials of the same type, that it's easily discoverable for the audience you described, that it's clearly linked to from related materials. In the long-term, I would probably look to reduce duplication between that page and other resources related to archivebot, but I don't have a specific idea about this yet.

Hope this answers your question.

One tangible point of my concern is that https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/archivebot.py/setup is heavily translated and has a good reason to be. Many of the people who want to use this template don't, and shouldn't be expected to, read English.

Perhaps this can be generalized into having content that should be translated on mediawiki.org.

Thanks, this is a very valid point, and one of the reasons why looking into translations for doc.mediawiki.org/pywikibot is also on the agenda. I can't say just yet how we will progress on this, but I am certainly not planning to delete or deprecate any content if we cannot provide an equally reasonable, well-supported, and translated replacement.

Sphinx does support i18n: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/advanced/intl.html but there is a lot of work to implement it. I also think i18n is a valid point for several parts but there should be a kind of automatism because most of description parts are code based documentations and their content may be outdated over time and it is indeed too hard to fix all related pages spreaded over several sites by hand. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/archivebot.py/setup for example reflects archivebot prior than 7.6 or much earlier. Most of the MW description is similar to this template but this is also outdated a lot.

I hope ease of use for translators is taken into account. Requiring git access would probably be a too high bar for translators. Requiring an account on an external website (not connected to one's Wikiemdia account) would not be ideal either. translatewiki.net (TWN) might be a necessary compromise, though. I believe Pywikibot is supported by some TWN workflows - how would they interact with Sphinx?

Regarding updating, at least Special:Translate automatically mark outdated pages as such among the pages managed there. (TWN does that, too.)

I agree, twn will be the way; Pywikibot already uses it for several translations but in a different way than using gettext library. Sphinx acts gettext based. Maybe sphinx-intl is a usefull tool to implement the workflow.

Updating the translations is one point. Updating the translation source from Pywkibot code base is the other point which need to rethinked.