Talk:Main Page

Import/Export
Hi guys! Just wanted to let you know that there's an alternative to copying and pasting -- you can Export pages from Wikipedia by using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export -- it's listed under "Special pages" in the WP toolbox. (Help is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Export). If you'd like to preserve the page history, uncheck the box "Include only the current revision, not the full history". It's not necessary to import the full page history, but may be helpful to you in some circumstances. You can export single pages, or many at once by entering a list or a category name.

Using Special:Export displays an XML file in your browser, which you can File/Save or right-click on and save to your computer.

If you're feeling ambitious, you can then use any text editor (Notepad, Word, GoogleDocs, etc) to alter the XML document. I usually Find all instances of "[[" and Replace them with "[[Wikipedia:", and Find all " " (the last tag in the article file) and Replace with " ", which places the required attribution template in each article.

If you are also exporting the page history, you may want to Replace all opening " " tags with " en.wp-" or something similar, so that the page history of the imported page clearly attributes the edits to WP users, and it won't appear that those users have Wikia accounts. (This will also prevent the occasional rare clash of account names.)

When the file is ready, you (as admins) can use Special:Import, which is listed under Restricted pages on the "Special pages" list here in your Wikia toolbox. (Help is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Import).

Hope that helps!

— Catherine (talk) 14:56, 3 July 2007 (UTC)