Help:Import

Since November 2003 there is the posibility to export Wikipedia articles in an XML wrapper. It is meant to be a cleaner way to transfer whole pages from one (MediaWiki-based) wiki to another.

This should not be confused with an XML-based replacement for or transformation of wiki markup (see Wikipedia DTD or something if you want that); it's just a way to package wikitext with its metadata (page title, date, author, etc) for transfer between programs that understand wikitext.

Here's a quick mock-up:

 <mediawiki xml:lang="en">
   <page>
     <title>Page title</title>
     <restrictions>sysop</restrictions>
     <revision>
       <timestamp>2001-01-15T13:15:00Z</timestamp>
       <contributor><username>Foobar</username></contributor>
       <comment>I have just one thing to say!</comment>
       <text>A bunch of text here.</text>
       <minor />
     </revision>
     <revision>
       <timestamp>2001-01-15T13:10:27Z</timestamp>
       <contributor><ip>10.0.0.2</ip></contributor>
       <comment>new!</comment>
       <text>An earlier revision.</text>
     </revision>
   </page>
   
   <page>
     <title>Talk:Page title</title>
     <revision>
       <timestamp>2001-01-15T14:03:00Z</timestamp>
       <contributor><ip>10.0.0.2</ip></contributor>
       <comment>hey</comment>
       <text>WHYD YOU LOCK PAGE??!!! i was editing that jerk</text>
     </revision>
   </page>
 </mediawiki>

A preliminary export function is checked in to the development branch in CVS and on http://test.wikipedia.org

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Caveats: should namespaces be the text, or symbolic names? Or should we leave them out entirely and let the parser deal with such a thing?

The parser needs to know the namespace's prefixes of the article's language anyway to parse the article content so it does not matter. BTW cur_counter is missing. -- Nichtich 18:09, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)