Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Transwiki

Starting
I've been thinking about making something like this for a while, and with this recent post from an editor over at the Wikia Annex, I've been inspired. It seems the Annex now lets non-admins preform article imports, allowing anyone to preform a transwiki. There is, of course, other hurdles, which is why a WikiProject for the effort is going to come in handy. -- Ned Scott 05:17, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I haven't updated it in a while, but User:Ned Scott/transwiki is what I have so far for notes about my own experiences with the transwiki process. -- Ned Scott 05:32, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm stretched a bit thin on some tasks on Wikipedia, with my available free time (the amount I can reasonably give to Wikipedia, that is). But in the next two days I am off from work, and will be able to format the page some more, giving people an idea of what I had in mind. Feel free to beat me to it, and add any of your own ideas of how such a project might work. -- Ned Scott 04:29, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Discussion of interest
Please see here.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 18:26, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Requirements To Import To Another Wiki
taken from Template talk:Navbox

I ran into some trouble trying to figure out how to import the Navbox template into my own wiki. More importantly I spent more time that I should have needed to figuring it out. The core content can be easily exported and imported using the special pages. Remaining requirements (as I found) are two extensions, ImageMap and ParserFunctions. I think it would be beneficial to others if a small amount of documentation was written on How To Enable Navbox On Your Own Wiki or something of that nature. Here is a start Template:Navbox MediaWiki:Common.js MediaWiki:Common.css
 * goto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export
 * enter the following into the text area (leave the Add pages from category input blank):
 * make sure all three check boxes are checked
 * hit export and save the xml file to disk
 * goto the Special:Import page on your own wiki
 * browse to the file and hit upload
 * goto http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions and follow installation instructions
 * goto http://www.chekmate.org/wiki/index.php/MW:_ImageMap_Extension and follow installation instructions
 * head to the Template:Navbox/doc page on your own wiki to see that everything installed ok

144.223.18.102 (talk) 21:51, 22 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Imagemap is actually not a required extension. Double check the code; it's only use is at Template:Navbox/doc, which has the transcluded template which shows the little red lock in the top right hand corner. Otherwise, it is not a necessity. --Izno (talk) 23:34, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi, I think this is a very important topic to document well. It seems that wikipedia is setting the standard for high-quality wiki content. It is difficult to achieve similar quality without all the Navbox/Infobox-y support. I don't know enough about how to get those things working in non-wikipedia wikis, but am eager to learn from this page as it grows. Keep up the good work.

154.5.119.172 (talk) 15:49, 29 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I resisted doing the export/import because I wanted to figure out why it wasn't working on my own. After about 2 and a half hours, I decided to just give in and follow your instructions (minus the ImageMap part).  30 seconds later everything was working great. *slaps forehead*.  Thanks.  EDIT:  I take that back, I am having all kinds of javascript issues now.  Keeps saying I am missing a ")". EDIT AGAIN: After finagling with it, I think that the export/import doesnt work well for Javascript files.  It ended up missing a few carrots "<" and other minor formatting that at first I thought was poor programming but then I realized there is no possible way for the code to work without these things and it must have been lost in the export/import.  That's my conclusion, I dont know if it's right.  I fixed the error by copy/pasting the javascript from this article page. --72.181.103.129 (talk) 14:06, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * This documentation is just what I have been looking for. I want to use Wikipedia templates on my own wiki, and before I read this section, I could not figure out how to do it. Many thanks for the explanation. However, maybe there is a more visible place to put this information, such as the FAQ page.  Some rewriting may be needed. --DThomsen8 (talk) 14:39, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Current Projects
FYI, I'm currently porting over Infobox to make it usable with outside media wikis.

Roadrunner (talk) 21:58, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Wikis that lack ParserFunctions
Some wikis I know lack ParserFunctions, which makes nearly all the templates useless.

There is a fix, however; if, ifeq and switch, the three most important ParserFunctions, can be implemented in pure Wiki markup (with some caveats). If anyone wants, they can check that out at bluwiki:Template:If and bluwiki:Template:Ifeq. nneonneo talk 16:25, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Infobox Weirdness
A friend of mine is building a wiki for a small forum, and I've been helping out on the backend, borrowing a great deal from this project. I've been using Bluwiki's if| and ifeq| because the server host won't allow PHP5 and therefore we cannot use the PHP5 Wikimedia releases. It seems that, whenever an infobox is used on a page, leaving any possible datafield blank will cause a strange dashed box to appear around the space where the value would be. Does anyone have a clue why this would happen? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.204.219.131 (talk) 02:01, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Reflist
Reflist requires some CSS from MediaWiki:Common.css. --—— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk  -  19:22, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Is there a place where we can list articles to be transwikied?
Thanks! --A NobodyMy talk 18:23, 4 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Usually you can tag them with one of the templates listed here, which categorizes it to a transwiki category for users or bots to deal with. Hers fold  (t/a/c) 21:51, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, those templates are for transwiking to another Wikimedia Wiki. The aim of this WikiProject is more for other wikis, such as those on fiction or some specialized field.


 * And in that case, you don't need to tag an article to be transwikied on Wikipedia's side of things. Just contact an admin on the target Wiki and they should be able to import the file, or they'll often have cut-and-paste instructions (assuming the edit history on Wikipedia isn't going away). Annex also has some easy to use transwiki tools. -- Ned Scott 02:31, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Outdated
The Common.js and Common.css files that are provided here are heavily outdated now. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:18, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * A number of the templates are too, actually. I may add updating them to my to-do list. 「ダイノ ガイ 千 ？！」(Dinoguy1000) 20:18, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

If no one beats me to it I'll try and update them in the next few days. I'm slowly becoming more active on wiki again. -- Ned Scott 06:29, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Aah, nice to see you back around some, Ned. =) 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 07:54, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Subpages for related but non-affliated projects
In a discussion at Village pump (policy), it has been suggested that pages about projects that use Wikipedia material but are not officially affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation could be organized as subpages of this project. Input from members of this project about the idea would be helpful. Please visit the discussion linked above if you would like to contribute to it. Thanks. --RL0919 (talk) 00:08, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The discussion now lives in Village pump (policy)/Archive 68. I think the idea is a good one. Possibly one of the most unfortunate aspects of Wikipedia's deletion process is the failure to transwiki as many deleted articles as possible to suitable alternative outlets. Anything that can help the Wikipedia community be more proactive about transwiki'ing rather than simply destroying content is probably a good idea. --Teratornis (talk) 19:27, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Environmental, design or development topics etc, transwiki to Appropedia
Please note that any such page with some kind of value in environmental, design, appropriate technology, international development, architecture, urban planning issues etc etc, is welcome to be transwikied to Appropedia. This can help people be more understanding when their page is being deleted, if they see it's welcome and appreciated somewhere, but just not suitable for Wikipedia.

An Appropedia admin would be needed to do the import thing, in which case you could email me the XML at chriswaterguy (at) appropedia &middot; org.

Or if it's mainly the work of one person, they can just be credited in the edit summary, or the user could add it themselves.

Thanks. --Chriswaterguy talk 04:38, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Would I violate WP:SOAPBOX if I say Appropedia is awesome? In general, Wikipedia's deletion process needs to get better at integrating with a transwiki process to alternative outlets. Also you can search Deletionpedia for articles deleted from Wikipedia. --Teratornis (talk) 04:39, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Template "pack" and 'MediaWiki "pack"
The first two goals stated on the page are:

Template "pack" and the MediaWiki "pack"

but did either of these "packs" ever make it into a usable package? --DThomsen8 (talk) 16:58, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Problems transwikiing
I'm trying to transwiki here in order to use it on this page, and all I ever get is header "No Title", only line "No Title - No information". What am I doing wrong? CJ Miller. (That's my name.Don't wear it out.) 18:09, 7 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Have you set up an offline personal wiki running on MediaWiki by the method in mw:Manual:Wiki on a stick? I find this is vital for template porting, especially if you lack administrator privilege on the target wiki. --Teratornis (talk) 18:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Template porting: theory and practice
I wrote a user subpage on Appropedia that documents what (little) I've learned about template porting (transwikiing):


 * appropedia:User:Teratornis/Template porting: theory and practice

Comments and criticism welcome, here or on the talk page there. Appropedia's site license is cc-by-sa-3.0 so anyone is free to copy anything they find useful. --Teratornis (talk) 18:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Problem with Navboxes
Hello,

I copied the Navbox template as well as the Common.js and parts of the Common.css directly from Wikipedia. However, the navbox refuses to be collapsible, as you can see here. Also, the header is misaligned. Any suggestions?--195.14.205.192 (talk) 15:25, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I got the portable version of Navbox to be collapsible on . See:
 * Appropedia:User:Teratornis/Tasks
 * Appropedia:User:Teratornis/Tasks
 * Appropedia:User:Teratornis/Tasks
 * Appropedia:User:Teratornis/Tasks
 * Good luck. --Teratornis (talk) 09:54, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, I mean that's great, but that's not very helpful. I copied Common.css and Common.js directly from Wikipedia, and I got the Nav templates from WikiProject:Transwiki – I basically did everything you did. And yet, it still looks like this. That's why I'm asking for suggestions as to anything I may have done wrong or overlooked.--213.196.218.100 (talk) 18:09, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Sometimes I found it useful to compare the XHTML output from the same wikitext on two different wikis by selecting View | Page source in the browser (not viewing the wikitext source, but the resulting XHTML output from MediaWiki). If you can create two exact copies of the same wikitext test page, on two different wikis, they should generate much the same XHTML. Sometimes this can give insight as to why a chunk of it (such as to produce the show/hide feature) is missing on one wiki. The XHTML is a more definitive expression of what a wiki is doing than the visual appearance of the rendered page. I also found it helpful to create my own personal wiki by installing a local copy of MediaWiki using the method in mw:Manual:Wiki on a stick. Then you have another instance of MediaWiki to compare to Wikipedia and the destination wiki, for a sanity check. As I recall, getting the collapsible tables feature to work was difficult. It may not be enough to "basically" do what I did, you would have to be sufficiently close to make it work, and the destination wiki would have to be similar enough so what it needs is the same as what I did. All I can suggest is to examine each step I followed, compare my diffs to yours, and analyze any differences. Template porting between MediaWiki wikis tends to be a difficult problem, demanding strong analytical skills. --Teratornis (talk) 21:02, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Template:Convert
Has anyone ported Convert to a non-Wikimedia wiki? It looks like a monster, with hundreds of separate sub-templates to handle the various unit conversions and format options. --Teratornis (talk) 09:56, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
 * As sort of an update on this, Template:Convert/Transwiki guide provides some hints. --Teratornis (talk) 19:40, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Updates updates updates
Recently I've been tasked with cleaning up http://wiki.xbmc.org which has caused me to find new tactics in getting some wikipedia-specific stuff working on an external wiki. I've got lots of stuff to update here and share from the experience, including a lot more of the nitty gritty technical side as far as the actual mediawiki software. I also have ideas for better ways to approach this whole matter that will be more maintainable, rather than constantly trying to make forked templates and files. Will post more soon. -- Ned Scott 10:47, 9 September 2011 (UTC)
 * How is this going? --Teratornis (talk) 19:43, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Transwiki request
Some one asked above and did not get a very clear reply. So I will repeat it and specifically request that someone transwiki the edit histories of: In each case, I have transwikied by copy&paste and made some minor changes in the process so the transwikied histories should be installed "underneath" my version and under any edits which the original authors may have applied after my transwiki. &mdash; RHaworth (talk · contribs) 22:58, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * User:Patricia Carbonell/Translationdraft to es:Usuario:Patricia Carbonell/Translationdraft
 * User:Lalilolailo/Translationdraft to es:Usuario:Lalilolailo/Translationdraft
 * User:EnriqueGarcia/Translationdraft to es:Usuario:EnriqueGarcia/Translationdraft.
 * I'm moving their histories to es:wp. When I did it, I'll demand to delete this pages here. Don't worry. --Millars (talk) 11:50, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I did it. The articles (drafts) and their histories are now on es:wp. Should they be deleted here? --Millars (talk) 12:31, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Changing map used in many wikis
Not quite sure where to raise this - I tried WikiProject Maps but so far without response.

Two new provinces of Papua New Guinea were established on 17th May 2012, Hela and Jiwaka. I have modified the numbered province map to show the location of these: at present it is on en:wikipedia at File:Papua new guinea provinces (numbers) 2012.png. I was wondering what would be the best way to put this into commons - overwriting the existing File:Papua new guinea provinces (numbers).png, or with a different name? About 51 pages across 39 wikis have tables naming the provinces by reference to the map. I have left the numbers of the existing provinces unchanged, so if I did overwrite the existing map these pages would be right as far as they went, just have two unexplained numbers. I'm hesitant to launch into modifying all these pages myself - admittedly for most of them Hela & Jiwaka would be the correct entries, but there are 5 pages in Cyrillic (Хела & Дживака?), 1 in Greek (Έλα & Τζιβάκα?), and I wouldn't know where to start with Armenian, Chinese, Farsi, Hebrew, Japanese & Korean. Advice please.--Keith Edkins ( Talk ) 07:20, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

File request
Can someone please move the screenshot at outreach:File:Historytab.png to either en.wp or to Commons, so that it can be placed at the lead of Help:Page history (and thus possibly reduce the number of people who think that page is supposed to be about real-world history)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:48, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:48, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

HersfoldBot
Is there any effort to revive or replace User:HersfoldBot? Category:Copy to Wiktionary contains articles going back to its inactivation in early 2013. —Ost (talk) 23:23, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!


Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:57, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Tranwiki templates
FYI, a bunch of transwiki templates have been nominated for deletion at WP: Templates for discussion/Log/2021 December 21 -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 03:20, 22 December 2021 (UTC)