Default Wikipedia Bridge partially broken

[florianfiegel]

Describe the bug
The default wikipedia bridge causes the following error when the languages Dutch or German are selected, the others work fine:

Bridge encountered an unexpected situation! (18473)
Today'sfeatured article from de.wikipedia.org was unable to receive or process the remote website's content! Error message:Call to a member function find() on nullQuery string:action=display&bridge=Wikipedia&language=de&subject=tfa&fullarticle=on&format=AtomVersion:dev.2020-02-26`

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
Select German or Dutch as language.
I found it to be the same on other public instances example

Expected behavior
The same that would happen with the other languages … 

[em92]

Ping @logmanoriginal

[Bockiii]

I was looking into this @em92 .

Yes, this issue is still there, so the bridge seems to be broken (at least partially) for at least a year. Still, there was only 1 issue reported, which may indicate the usage of the bridge.

The bridge can do 2 things: "Featured Article" and "Did you know..". The "Featured article" actually has it's own RSS feed from wikipedia, available in all languages that support it:
English: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=featuredfeed&feed=featured&feedformat=atom
German: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=featuredfeed&feed=featured&feedformat=atom
etc.

The "Did you know.." is tricky. It's not automatically generated content that has the same endpoint in the API or even in wording anywhere. It's a manually produced list (with responsible people for each day and so on... suuuper manual effort) that is updated by a bot and then embedded into the main page. I could not find a non-individual-language-site-scraping mechanism to get this data.

This leaves us with 2 options: Fix the bridge and maintain 10+ individual sites to scrape, only for the "Did you know" entries (as the featured article can be retrieved through the API) or just flat out kill the bridge (which seems to not be used a lot since parts of it are broken for a year and a half :D ).

50% of it is supported natively by wikipedia and the other 50% will need a high level of maintenance and individual code for each language.

Thoughts?

[dvikan]

Fixed in #2167