my script now supports the mw2mdwn converter!

[ikiwiki.git] / doc / tips / convert_mediawiki_to_ikiwiki.mdwn

diff --git a/doc/tips/convert_mediawiki_to_ikiwiki.mdwn b/doc/tips/convert_mediawiki_to_ikiwiki.mdwn
index ab698449406c6dd47ca08bdf60929be728ad87f4..4e32e894910380c33aa3a1872cc7bc2bd02844ea 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/tips/convert_mediawiki_to_ikiwiki.mdwn
+++ b/doc/tips/convert_mediawiki_to_ikiwiki.mdwn
@@ -30,15 +30,16 @@ that this script is sensitive to the specific markup used on the page, so if
 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('&lt;','<').\
             replace('&gt;','>')
 
@@ -47,10 +48,7 @@ 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`)
+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.
@@ -58,7 +56,28 @@ 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
 
@@ -117,7 +136,7 @@ into an ikiwiki tag name using a script such as
     pattern =  r'\[\[Category:([^\]]+)\]\]'
     
     def manglecat(mo):
-            return '[[!tag %s]]' % mo.group(1).strip().replace(' ','_')
+            return '\[[!tag %s]]' % mo.group(1).strip().replace(' ','_')
             
     for line in sys.stdin.readlines():
             res = re.match(pattern, line)
@@ -130,11 +149,21 @@ into an ikiwiki tag name using a script such as
 The [[plugins/contrib/mediawiki]] plugin can be used by ikiwiki to interpret
 most of the Mediawiki syntax.
 
-## External links
+The following things are not working:
+
+* templates
+* tables
+* spaces and other funky characters ("?") in page names
+
+## Scripts
 
 [[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. A copy of the 
-information found on this website is stored at <http://github.com/mithro/media2iki>
+information found on this website is stored at <http://github.com/mithro/media2iki>.
+
+[[Albert]] wrote a ruby script to convert from mediawiki's database to ikiwiki at <https://github.com/docunext/mediawiki2gitikiwiki>
 
+[[Anarcat]] wrote a python script to convert from a mediawiki website to ikiwiki at <http://anarcat.ath.cx/software/mediawikigitdump.git/>. The script doesn't need any special access or privileges and communicates with the documented API (so it's a bit slower, but allows you to mirror sites you are not managing, like parts of Wikipedia). The script can also incrementally import new changes from a running site, through RecentChanges inspection. It also supports mithro's new Mediawiki2markdown converter.
 
+[[scy]] wrote a python script to convert from mediawiki XML dumps to git repositories at <https://github.com/scy/levitation>.