Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-43596541-20200117223316

I check the Wikipedia  Help:Bots  and it is quite overwheming ... There is  mentions of  "pywikibot' which is, if I understood,  a toolset  of scripts wiitten in PYTHON to do maintenance chores of a wiki...

I guess my first question is:  Is "pywikibot"  really that spread amongst the Wiki maintainers community ? Or are most "power users"  using  a different or even a PHP tool  instead ?

As a Windows 10  user, I guess I would need to get the  .NET flavor of PYTHON and install it ... There was some mention I should get "Visual Studio' and add a "PYTHON" Language pack ...  I'd be intrested to learn about alternative to "Visual Studio' in the Windows environment for script editing.

I  had some expericence in the *NIX world in a past life with some sh / csh / bash scripts along with basic awk (which I totally forgot (^)) along with programming in several languages from Pascal to 4GL so I'm not a total newbie ... At this point I am looking for the advice of experienced Wiki BOT & Power-Users and to see if I should look into PHP or  slither along the PYTHON road as Wikipedia seem to present it as the road most traveled for quick install-to-scripting turnaround...

I understantdt here will be  a (somewhat steep) learning curve getting PYTHON scripts to interact with a Wiki and  I intend to use a "SANDBOX Wiki" I already created to learn about automated script wihtout damaging anything (^) ...

Also if anyone has a ballpark of what it can represent time-wise to start from scratch and have a script that would dump a  "Page_Name" to "Page_Name.txt"  with a script containg  the proper GET & POST HTML statements to the Wiki server ... Like a generic "number of days for install,  scripting the first "Hello Word"  and dumping the Wiki-Text of pages from a Category to a dump.txt file as the first exercise ... Editing will come afterwards and it should not be more complicated than the olf "vi" s/// command   (^) ...

And lastly,  I don't want to start a "religion' war between PYTHON and PHP proponents, I just want to get along what is the most common for 'causal Bots' users (^)  and then get on the learning path ASAP ... I just don't want to rush into PYTHON to find out weeks later that PHP was best suited for the Windows environment (^) ...

Thanks fior any advice and pointers on BOTs and scripting ...

P.S. Is this Forum the right  place for such a Topic or I should consider joining  the DIscord server ? Or somehwere else ? ... 