+[[!toc levels=2]]
+
Mediawiki is a dynamically-generated wiki which stores it's data in a
relational database. Pages are marked up using a proprietary markup. It is
possible to import the contents of a Mediawiki site into an ikiwiki,
The following instructions describe ways of obtaining the current version of
the wiki. We do not yet cover importing the history of edits.
+Another set of instructions and conversion tools (which imports the full history)
+can be found at <http://github.com/mithro/media2iki>
+
## Step 1: Getting a list of pages
The first bit of information you require is a list of pages in the Mediawiki.
you have tweaked your mediawiki theme a lot from the original, you will need
to adjust this script too:
+ import sys
from xml.dom.minidom import parse, parseString
- dom = parse(argv[1])
+ dom = parse(sys.argv[1])
tables = dom.getElementsByTagName("table")
pagetable = tables[-1]
anchors = pagetable.getElementsByTagName("a")
for a in anchors:
print a.firstChild.toxml().\
- replace('&,'&').\
+ replace('&','&').\
replace('<','<').\
replace('>','>')
Also, if you have pages with titles that need to be encoded to be represented
in HTML, you may need to add further processing to the last line.
+Note that by default, `Special:Allpages` will only list pages in the main
+namespace. You need to add a `&namespace=XX` argument to get pages in a
+different namespace. (See below for the default list of namespaces)
+
+Note that the page names obtained this way will not include any namespace
+specific prefix: e.g. `Category:` will be stripped off.
+
### Querying the database
If you have access to the relational database in which your mediawiki data is
-stored, it is possible to derive a list of page names from this.
+stored, it is possible to derive a list of page names from this. With mediawiki's
+MySQL backend, the page table is, appropriately enough, called `table`:
+
+ SELECT page_namespace, page_title FROM page;
+
+As with the previous method, you will need to do some filtering based on the
+namespace.
+
+### namespaces
+
+The list of default namespaces in mediawiki is available from <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Namespace#Built-in_namespaces>. Here are reproduced the ones you are most likely to encounter if you are running a small mediawiki install for your own purposes:
+
+[[!table data="""
+Index | Name | Example
+0 | Main | Foo
+1 | Talk | Talk:Foo
+2 | User | User:Jon
+3 | User talk | User_talk:Jon
+6 | File | File:Barack_Obama_signature.svg
+10 | Template | Template:Prettytable
+14 | Category | Category:Pages_needing_review
+"""]]
## Step 2: fetching the page data
### Method 1: via HTTP and `action=raw`
-You need to create two derived strings from the page titles already: the
+You need to create two derived strings from the page titles: the
destination path for the page and the source URL. Assuming `$pagename`
contains a pagename obtained above, and `$wiki` contains the URL to your
mediawiki's `index.php` file:
mkdir -p `dirname "$dest"`
wget -q "$wiki?title=$src&action=raw" -O "$dest"
+You may need to add more conversions here depending on the precise page titles
+used in your wiki.
+
+If you are trying to fetch pages from a different namespace to the default,
+you will need to prefix the page title with the relevant prefix, e.g.
+`Category:` for category pages. You probably don't want to prefix it to the
+output page, but you may want to vary the destination path (i.e. insert an
+extra directory component corresponding to your ikiwiki's `tagbase`).
+
### Method 2: via HTTP and `Special:Export`
Mediawiki also has a special page `Special:Export` which can be used to obtain
It is possible to extract the page data from the database with some
well-crafted queries.
-## Step 2: format conversion
+## Step 3: format conversion
+
+The next step is to convert Mediawiki conventions into Ikiwiki ones.
+
+### categories
-The next step is to convert Mediawiki conventions into Ikiwiki ones. These
-include
+Mediawiki uses a special page name prefix to define "Categories", which
+otherwise behave like ikiwiki tags. You can convert every Mediawiki category
+into an ikiwiki tag name using a script such as
- * convert Categories into tags
- * ...
+ import sys, re
+ pattern = r'\[\[Category:([^\]]+)\]\]'
+
+ def manglecat(mo):
+ return '\[[!tag %s]]' % mo.group(1).strip().replace(' ','_')
+
+ for line in sys.stdin.readlines():
+ res = re.match(pattern, line)
+ if res:
+ sys.stdout.write(re.sub(pattern, manglecat, line))
+ else: sys.stdout.write(line)
+
+## Step 4: Mediawiki plugin
+
+The [[plugins/contrib/mediawiki]] plugin can be used by ikiwiki to interpret
+most of the Mediawiki syntax.
## External links
[[sabr]] used to explain how to [import MediaWiki content into
git](http://u32.net/Mediawiki_Conversion/index.html?updated), including full
-edit history, but as of 2009/10/16 that site is not available.
+edit history, but as of 2009/10/16 that site is not available. A copy of the
+information found on this website is stored at <http://github.com/mithro/media2iki>
+
-The [[plugins/contrib/mediawiki]] plugin can then be used by ikiwiki to build
-the wiki.