+[[!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.
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. The following numbers correspond to common namespaces:
+
+ * 10 - templates (`Template:foo`)
+ * 14 - categories (`Category:bar`)
+
+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
### 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. These
-include
+The next step is to convert Mediawiki conventions into Ikiwiki ones.
- * convert Categories into tags
- * ...
+### categories
+
+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
+
+ 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.