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    • MediaWiki importer status?

    Posted by Oshyan United States

    Hello, I am new to TikiWiki and coming from MediaWiki. I have a large amount of content in MediaWiki and would really, really, really like to migrate it over to Tiki to get access to all the great feature improvements, design improvements, etc. MediaWiki feels like a dinosaur by comparison.

    The problem is that the current importer fails on my MediaWiki XML file because it says it doesn't support version 0.10 of the MediaWiki format. There are other reports of the same error going back a year or two and 0.10 has been the current MediaWiki format version for years. Why hasn't the importer been updated?

    Surely you all recognize that a significant potential source of new users will be coming from MediaWiki, right? If you want to grow your community as much as possible, supporting MediaWiki import is certainly one of the best ways to do that. As it stands it seems that no current, up-to-date MediaWiki users will be able to move to Tiki.

    I hope the importer can get some development attention in the near future.

    Thanks!

    - Oshyan

    Reads: 363727
    Posted by John Morris United States

    Boy this would be a major break through wouldn't it? I completely agree, it worked at one point. I think where it fell off is MW's versions change the way they do and it may have been hard to keep the importer up to date to accommodate MW versioning.

    I would like to see if there is a way talk our tiki gurus into making this feature work again, and keep it maintained. They have a ton of work to do on a daily schedule between them all, but like you said, if this importer worked, it sure could bring over many users from MW.


    Posted by Oshyan United States

    While I know there is a lot of work to be done on long-time feature requests, core improvements, and the like, it seems to me all the features in the world aren't going to be as useful without greater adoption. I don't know the real numbers, but my overall sense is that Tiki is less popular than I think it *could* be, and I think this is due in part to the difficulty in migrating from existing solutions. When people first start, MediaWiki is often the most obvious solution, whether due to its high visibility (i.e. as part of Wikipedia's visibility), or its relative simplicity, etc. But I think the general trajectory for many Wiki users is to start simply then realize there is a lot of missing or clumsily/awkwardly handled stuff in MediaWiki (and other wikis) and then have a desire to migrate. Making that process as easy as possible will surely be good for adoption.

    The current spec for the XML format is here: https://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.10.xsd
    I don't remember for sure but I think the last supported format in the Tiki importer is 0.6 (maybe 0.4?). If that's the case it does not look like the changes since then are massive. Certainly it would take time to implement support in the import parser to handle the additional tags, but if they don't map to anything in Tiki they can just be ignored, and since they were never supported previously, it seems like that would not be much of a loss. In other words my sense is that supporting the updates to the format should not be tremendously labor intensive. Again I don't mean to trivialize the work involved, but from a cost-benefit perspective it seems like a good target for some development time in the relatively near future.

    Of course I'm biased. 😉

    Is there a particular place where we can meaningfully promote/advocate for this, other than the forums? The lack of much official engagement here is a bit disappointing.

    - Oshyan



    Posted by James Geddes
    Has there been any progress on this? We too have a lot of mediawiki articles that we want to migrate to tiki

    Posted by Saša Janiška Croatia

    > Has there been any progress on this?

    In the meantime there is some support for Tiki in Pandoc, but there is no support (yet) for Tiki writer. 😢

    I also do consider that Tiki could be made much more popular and/or used, but lack of proper import/export capabilities is the reason for that (in my case I'd like to be able to use my preferred editor and write most of the content offline, while still having Tiki's advantages over static-site-generators), so you can consider commenting this issue to get Tiki writer support within Pandoc.