User talk:Mike Peel

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Join us for “Many Tongues, One Movement: Voices Across Languages”!

Hello Mike Peel,

We’re excited to invite you to an inspiring global virtual gathering: the first Capacity Exchange Translat-a-thon.

Together with Language Diversity Hub, the Capacity Exchange (CapX) team will host its first Translation Marathon dedicated to ensuring linguistic equity in access to this amazing tool aimed to connect Wikimedians.
If you enjoy contributing to Wikimedia projects through translating and adapting content into different languages, this event is for you! Join us in the celebration of the multilingual spirit of the Wikimedia Movement at an event where communities that contribute in diverse languages will be able to share local knowledge and collaborate across borders.
Many Tongues, One Movement: Voices Across Languages

• Date: December 6, 2025
• Time: 12 PM (UTC) - Check the event page for your local timezone
• Location: Online (Meta-Wiki + live session links)

Register for the Event here

If you can’t join the live event, you can still contribute to the translations! Edits will be counted for two weeks, until December 20th. And everyone who participates will receive a special badge to display on their CapX profiles.

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Whether you’re an individual contributor, a user group, a community initiative or an affiliate, CapX helps you grow through knowledge exchange.

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With warm regards,
Joris Darlington Quarshie
Outreach Facilitator,
Capacity Exchange Project – Wikimedia Brasil

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:55, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

Pi bot may be affected by rate limits

Hi. We believe that Pi bot may be affected by the API rate limits that we started enforcing today. This should be resolved by sending cookies with requests that are authenticated using an owner-only consumer, which will grant it an exemption as an approved bot. This FAQ entry explains why cookies need to be enabled. Happy to answer any further questions you might have. JTweed-WMF (talk) 18:19, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

@JTweed-WMF: Thanks for the heads-up, but I'm not sure which part of Pi bot's operations would be affected by this change. The main scripts running on the Raspberry Pi use Pywikibot and should be running as a logged in bot, which I think should still be OK without needing cookies? There was an issue with the back-end for the distributed games it powers (like [1]), but I think I (with Daniel Kinzler's help) resolved that already by ensuring it was (read-only) logging in. If there are API requests that are being rejected, could you send me an email with them please?

I'll be at the hackathon later this week (and might bring Pi bot with me since my home internet will be down), if you or someone else might be able to chat about this there? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:41, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Hm, it's indeed a bit strange. Over the past 2 days, I see about 850,000 requests from Pi_bot, 20% of which were not authenticated [the absolute number could be off by an order of magnitude or so, the log is sampled, I think 1:100, but I could be wrong]. I couldn't immediately spot an obvious difference between the authenticated and the unauthenticated requests, I don't know what's going on there. Maybe User:Xqt has an idea...

Anyway, what prompted Jonathan's message is that Pi_bot came up in a sample I took from the rate limit database. It showed 409 unauthenticated requests per minute, which is about double the limit we will start enforcing soon. So half of these requests would fail in the future, some 42,000 requests per day. DKinzler (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Maybe the session cookie that pywikibot is using is expiring, it it doesn't notice / doesn't store the updated one that is coming in the with responses?... That's what it looks like from the logs...

Note btw that "logged in" for the API gateway and "logged in" for MediaWiki are controlled by different cookies. They can expire at different times, but would get refreshed with the next request (and also get refreshed proactively when they get closed to expiring). DKinzler (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

@DKinzler (WMF): Ah, thanks. I'm doing a few more requests per day than I realised then...! I should see if I can reduce that. It also sounds like I need to make sure all scripts are logging in at the start - it might be that Pi bot's working through a list without finding things to edit for a while, and only logging in when it finds something it can... Sounds like I have a hackathon project to work on...! Will track at phab:T424403. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:53, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Mike (and Daniel)! Unfortunately I won’t be at the Hackathon this year, but @HCoplin-WMF will be and I know she would love to chat with you about what you’re doing and how we could make it better. JTweed-WMF (talk) 21:02, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, happy to chat at the hackathon @HCoplin-WMF:! For background, the main thing that Pi bot is looking after is the linking of new Wikipedia articles on multiple big language projects (including enwiki) to Wikidata, as well as sitelinks to Commons categories (for Wikidata Infobox deployment) and other related things. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:18, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

The User-Agent content would help to find out what's going in there. The minimum Pywikibot release should be 11.0.0 to handle rate limits gracefully, and the config.minthrottle should not be 0. Cookies are handled automatically but you have to use the login script the first time using the bot or after a longer outage if you are not using OAuth login. Best  @xqt 05:41, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

@Xqt: Thanks, that's good to know. I have been using 10.5, now upgraded to 11.2. I'm adding site.login() to the start of each script to make sure it's logged in. minthrottle is no longer set to 0. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 10:31, 3 May 2026 (UTC)