Wikipedia:WikiProject Transwiki

Welcome to WikiProject Transwiki, a WikiProject for helping with the transwiki process outside of the Wikimedia family. This is done by explaining how to import and export articles, linking to help with MediaWiki software, prepping templates for use outside of Wikipedia, listing available resources (including editors willing to help), and much more.

For more information on WikiProjects, please see WikiProjects and WikiProject best practices.

Before we begin
It should be noted that if you wish to have the below on a wiki that you administrate for or likewise, you must get the parser function available here or this will not work.

Main goals

 * 1) Template "pack" – a pack of commonly used templates that is pure wikicode and ready to be imported via xml file. We'll need to identify which templates should go into this basic pack. Some templates might require converting into pure-wiki table code, or for simplification.
 * 2) MediaWiki "pack" – similar to the template pack, a bunch of MediaWiki namespace pages that are formatted for general and easy use for most other wikis
 * 3) How to export – Expanding on the export/import guide, which so far is very minimal.
 * 4) A general technical guide on how to adapt articles for use on another wiki
 * 5) Establish other resources to aid the reuse of Wikipedia content

MediaWiki files

 * /MediaWiki:Common.css - Click edit and select all text. Disregard appearance when viewed as a normal page. Should work on most installations of MediaWiki. Will import most of the css styling for the class attributes that Wikipedia uses (especially useful for classes in wikitables). Last updated: April 17, 2008
 * /MediaWiki:Common.js - Click edit and select all text. Disregard appearance when viewed as a normal page. Same as above, but for some common javascript. Also includes useful bug fixes that might not be fixed in the current version of MediaWiki. Last updated: April 17, 2008

Common.js doesn't seem to be loaded for MediaWiki 1.7.1, I got collapsable tables to work by cutting and pasting that section of code into MediaWiki:Monobook.js

Templates

 * These templates can normally be used as-is:


 * Template:!! – Vital for most other templates to work. Recommend full protection when used on other wikis.
 * Template:- – Not as vital, but still highly used.
 * Template:·
 * Template:•
 * Template:Ndash
 * Template:Mdash
 * Template:Nowrap
 * Template:Nowraplinks – Needs the "nowraplinks" class in MediaWiki:Common.css to work.
 * Template:Main
 * Template:Tl
 * Template:Tlx
 * Template:Infobox Film – Requires transwiki infobox to be installed
 * Template:Unsigned
 * Template:Warning

Special templates
Many Wikipedia templates cannot be directly exported to other wikis because they include HTML code within a parser function that does not translate across wikis. Wikipedia has a "tidy" pass that cleans up HTML code. Without that pass, HTML code within templates get translated into quoted tags that get displayed.

To fix this problem the following templates have been converted so that templates contain HTML code within a parser function rather than using wiki tags for table conversions. See Conditional tables for examples of how to do this.


 * The following templates have been converted to use pure-wiki code, which is often required for most MediaWiki wikis, which do not have the tidy extension configured in the same way as wikipedia
 * /Template:Navbox - December 26, 2008 - Fix tag at end
 * /Template:Navbar - January 13, 2011 - Stripped cross-namespace support
 * /Template:Infobox - December 26, 2008
 * /Template:Notice - June 29, 2008
 * /Template:Infobox animanga character - Nov 6, 2007
 * Template:Infobox animanga (works as is, since it's just an instruction page)
 * /Template:Infobox animanga/Header - Oct 18, 2007
 * Template:Infobox animanga/Footer (works as is, since it's basically nothing more than, to end the table)
 * /Template:Infobox animanga/Other - Oct 18, 2007
 * /Template:Infobox animanga/Anime - Oct 18, 2007
 * /Template:Infobox animanga/Manga - Oct 18, 2007
 * /Template:Infobox animanga/Movie - Oct 18, 2007


 * /Template:Japanese episode list Dec 20, 2007
 * /Template:Infobox VG - Nov 2, 2007
 * /Template:Ambox - Oct 11, 2007
 * /Template:Infobox Company - April 17, 2008
 * /Template:Information - February 6, 2011
 * /Template:Shortcut compact - April 3, 2011 (The template itself is portable, but since it contains HTML table code, it causes problems when used inside parser function code, such as in the examples on the template documentation subpage when transcluded onto the template page by Documentation. The portable version removes these worries.)

Coding example
Information has several lines with non-portable HTML table tags:

These lines conditionally display the "Other versions" row of the image information table with a  statement. To make the template portable, change the offending lines to use wikitext table code, and use ! to encode the table pipe characters:

The  table code characters do not themselves need encoding. The same goes for pipe characters that are part of the template code itself. Only the pipe characters that are part of the table syntax need encoding.

Mediawiki extension packets

 * Debian package Mediawiki-extensions
 * Ubuntu package Mediawiki-extensions
 * TurnKey MediaWiki preinstalled minimal Ubuntu OS including popular extensions
 * Unofficial bundles of the extensions in the Wikimedia SVN repository can sometimes be found on the toolserver. These bundles are arbitrary snapshots, so keep in mind they might contain a broken version of the extension (just as if you load them from the developer's repository directly).