Notes

20211004

Questions about Pywikibot:

Digging into the example, there's this textlib.extract_sections, but it's not documented as part of the API. What gives?
Once you extract a document into its corresponding sections, you can pick out a specific section. But what then?
You can't (apparently) modify the Section object.
You can't create your own Section, because it's a private object, not documented, not part of public API.
So, we end up looping over each section, and finding section.title + section.content unless it's the section we want.
This seems really idiotic, but there's no documentation of any of these functions or objects, sooooo what the fuck am I supposed to do?
I'm getting stuck on the very first non-trivial task I have, the very first non-trivial article I'm editing.
All kinds of mysterious stuff going on in the pywikibot library that isn't documented. WTF??
Another example, how to connect the objects to a given page? Like, I can extract Category objects that tell me about categories on a page, but how do I update a section that may contain Categories, and preserve the Category links and only the category links? or the templates?
Why is this so difficult?

Solution to make this all simpler:

pywikibot is limited, capabilities-wise, by its crummy incomplete barely-sufficient documentation.
we have to do what we have to do, make it work using whatever capabilities it does have. work around that.
meaning, if we expect Records pages to be automatically updated, then structure them so it makes it really easy to parse the page.