User:Ned Scott/transwiki

Rough ideas for guidelines/advice on exporting articles outside of Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Things to do

 * Create/propose an "export article" link in the AFD template.


 * Create/propose a undeletion-for-transwiki request page and find interested admins to help out. Noting that articles deleted for BLP or copyright reasons cannot be undeleted, but others are normally not a problem.


 * Work with people who are good with pywikipediabot to create/improve scripts for the Wikipedia-to-external wiki process.
 * On this same idea, set up a request for bot-help kind of page for transwiking.


 * Seek non-python scripts to lessen the learning curve on at least some tasks.


 * Find out if programs and scripts like AWB can be adapted to work on external wikis. When you have a smaller group of editors, script-powered editing becomes pretty essential.

General advice

 * Categorize your images by the work of fiction it is in. Images are often forgotten about in the transwiki process, and besides individual article usage, are not often grouped together in a way that makes moving them easy.


 * Categorize your redirects by work of fiction. This is important for keeping article history of merged articles, as well as showing you what common alternative titles should be redirected on the new wiki.


 * Look to other similar external wikis for advice and ideas. You don't have to re-invent the wheel, and you shouldn't get too hung up on trying to make everything specific to the new wiki when it doesn't need to be.

Content advice

 * Don't give everything it's own article. While it might be tempting to shake off the restrictions of Wikipedia by giving everything its own article, it doesn't always make for a good move from an organizational standpoint. Something having its own article or not should not be a sign of importance, but rather simply about information organization. Preemptive redirects are a good way to guide new users to this idea, without actually banning any article from being independent. Take some time and discuss article structure, maybe even make a graphical tree to give other users an idea of what you have in mind. This not only helps you understand what articles should be made, but helps you keep articles linked when they should be. Of course, such a tree doesn't have to be exact with each page in the wiki, but even a general topical tree can help keep things organized for both editors and readers.


 * Example:


 * You might also want to keep "main" articles similar to Wikipedia articles, as general over-views, and have a companion article for the details, to make finding the basic information faster (one positive side effect of this is for wikis that wish to keep unexpected spoilers to a minimal). For example, you might have a main character article, but then have "relationships" articles (for teh omg romance), which would also mean you wouldn't have to update two character articles each time something small changed in their relationship. One possible idea, and there are many more to consider.

Taking from Wikipedia's example

 * When you're on an external wiki, you're almost always starting from scratch. Even basic templates we've come to use as fundamental functions have to be copied over, such as a simple Template:unsigned. It would be great to round up some of Wikipedia's most useful and most common operations templates under a category or page. A toolbox for new wikis, of sorts.


 * On a new wiki you also find yourself with the need for rules, guidelines, and policies. This is another way Wikipedia is a great resource, you not only can re-use articles, you can re-use our policies and guidelines under the GFDL as well. To save time and effort, I've told people on Digimon Wiki to use Wikipedia's same guidelines and policies, but with a list of exceptions (wikia:digimon:DigimonWiki:General guidelines). Eventually, when time permits, a simplified guideline set can be copied over. Wikia's own basic guidelines are often derived from Wikipedia's. (On that same note, for those who are wondering, Wikia only sets some very basic rules, and the rest is up to the consensus of the local community of editors for each wiki.)


 * Use Wikipedia's MOS guidelines. Wikipedia's WP:MOS guidelines emphasize on how to format the text, titles, and so on, and can normally be applied with ease to other wikis, since they normally don't contain content advice. Even when they do, it's still easy to just link to the Wikipedia MOS, and have a write up of exceptions on the external wiki. Alternatively, you can selectively use the MOS, pointing to specific issues such as naming conventions, etc.

Importing/Exporting

 * Special:Export's instructions are outdated, and some of the functions don't actually work as advertised. However, using this url directly will export the entire history of an article:


 * Save the resulting file as something.xml


 * Use a simple find/replace function in a text editor. Find all occurances of " " and replace it with " ". This will properly attribute the contributions, as well as avoiding wiki-identity fraud or innocent confusion.


 * A user with admin access on the external wiki can then import the file using Special:Import. Remember that if you are importing to Wikia, there is a size limit just below 2MB.