Moving a wiki to Miraheze

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Moving a wiki hosted by yourself, Fandom, or any other MediaWiki host is possible. You just need an 'XML' file with the history of your wiki.

Making an XML file[edit | edit source]

Exporting from Fandom[edit | edit source]

Fandom (Also known as Wikia) provides XML dump of wikis in [[Special:Statistics]]. It may be outdated - have your wiki administrators click "Send request" button there. If your wiki has no active administrators, you'll have to contact Fandom support to click it for you. See Fandom's own documentation for this. Please notify the system administrators of your wiki's statistics page. System Administrators: You MUST download "Current pages and history" because of legal reasons (in particular, the Attribution requirements of Creative Commons licenses require you to record all authors).

If you wish, you may provide Miraheze with archive(s) of images from the Fandom's site for us to automatically upload. Note that under Fandom's Terms of Service, automated scraping of images is illegal, and images are not provided in XML dumps. Our understanding is that downloading them manually is still legal, but Miraheze will not be able to assist you in that process. You may have additional rights under Article 20 of the GDPR in the EU in relation to images that you personally uploaded, due to any metadata linking it to your account.

Please also note that we have been advised by Fandom that they do not allow mass deletions of pages or linking to external wikis on the Main Page. In light of this, users may create a public post regarding the move which will be live for 2 weeks before being removed. The post may be retained for archival purposes regarding related discussion.[1]

Exporting from Special:Export[edit | edit source]

You can export your wiki using Special:Export. That page is self-explanatory, just make sure to uncheck "Include only the current revision, not the full history" because of the legal concerns outlined above. If this fails, you'll have to use the method below.

Exporting via maintenance scripts[edit | edit source]

If you have access to the server where MediaWiki is installed, issue dumpBackup.php in the wiki.

Caveats[edit | edit source]

  • None of the methods here export image files. You will have to copy the files and give them to the Miraheze system administrators for processing (via a Phabricator ticket).
  • Alternatively, you can use Wikiteam's wiki archiving tool to make a XML dump and download all available images at the same time. We can't guarantee it will work on all wikis, nor we will run it for you. You'll have to run it on your own and prepare the data.
  • These tools cannot populate the user database. Even if you have a database dump with the user data to import, we cannot handle their user information unless you have every users' consent to transfer the user data to us.
  • As always, any data transferred must have the proper copyright, and you must a license or ownership that allows you to host the content at Miraheze (e.g. Creative Commons). If you need to change the license of the wiki as a whole from CC-SA to some other license, please note this in your upload request.

Importing a wiki[edit | edit source]

Do it yourself[edit | edit source]

If your dump is really small (less than few KBs), you can try Special:Import on your wiki. (Don't try this command in Meta! Well... you can't do it, unless you have local sysop. Still, don't do it, unless you have compelling reason.) Images cannot be uploaded with the MediaWiki interface. Please see below section.

Request import[edit | edit source]

If your file is big enough that MediaWiki fails to process in due time, it has to be processed by Miraheze system administrators. Please request import using this form (Phabricator account required), and send your actual XML dump (with a link to phabricator task) to tech at miraheze.org. Image import should also follow this way, too.

You should avoid creating a new page that is also in your old wiki. That will cause a conflict, and will most likely result in unpleasant situations.

Please note that we will disable any editing (including account creation) on the wiki during the import process: Your wiki users will need to create an account on Meta (this wiki!) and use that username and password to log in on the wiki until the import is complete.

References[edit | edit source]
https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Moving_a_wiki_to_Miraheze
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