I propose to give up 1.23-1.26 MediaWiki support with **Pywikibot 8** which perhap come at the end of this year, wich also drops Python 3,5 due to T301908.
MW 1.23 is a LTS published 2014 but the life cycle ended in 2017 already. MW 1.24-1.26 had reached their life time in 2016-2017 too.
**Advantages**
- The main advantage is to support MediaWiki API formatversion 2 (T121334) which is recommended [1]. The new format came with MW 1.25 but is not stable with 1.26. With formatversion 2 there are useful changes [2]. The general theme is that the ApiResult arrays now have more metadata especially for Wikibase items and the new format makes this easier to handle.
- The following modules can be simplified if dropping old code [3]:
-* api
-* logentries
-* pages
-* revision
-* apisite
-* site generators
-* siteinfo
-* tokenwallet
- Tests are always difficult for old MW versions. Dropping old code improves the code health as well as the maintability
- Old code is still available with version the given tags. We also can provide an older release at https://pywikibot.toolforge.org like we do for python 2 support (maybe we can drop te later).
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Data_formats#JSON parameters
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:JSON_version_2
[3] https://codesearch.wmcloud.org/pywikibot/?q=1%5C.2%5B3-7%5D&i=nope&files=&excludeFiles=&repos=