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Help:Export

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Wiki pages can be exported in a special XML format to import into another MediaWiki installation or use it elsewise for instance for analysing the content. See also m:Syndication feeds for exporting all other information except pages, and see Help:Import on importing pages.

How to export

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There are at least six ways to export pages:

By default only the current version of a page is included. Optionally you can get all versions with date, time, user name and edit summary.

Additionally you can copy the SQL database. This is how dumps of the database were made available before MediaWiki 1.5 and it won't be explained here further.

Using 'Special:Export'

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To export all pages of a namespace, for example.

1. Get the names of pages to export

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  • Go to Special:Allpages and choose the desired namespace.
  • Copy the list of page names to a text editor
  • Put all page names on separate lines
  • Prefix the namespace to the page names (e.g. 'Help:Contents'), unless the selected namespace is the main namespace.

2. Perform the export

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  • Go to Special:Export and paste all your page names into the textbox, making sure there are no empty lines.
  • Click 'Submit query'
  • Save the resulting XML to a file using your browser's save facility.

and finally...

  • Open the XML file in a text editor. Scroll to the bottom to check for error messages.

Now you can use this XML file to perform an import.

Exporting the full history

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A checkbox in the Special:Export interface selects whether to export the full history (all versions of an article) or the most recent version of articles. A maximum of 1000 revisions are returned; other revisions can be requested as detailed in MW:Parameters to Special:Export.

Export format

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The format of the XML file you receive is the same in all ways. This format is codified in XML Schema at http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.6.xsd. This format is not intended for viewing in a web browser, though some browsers show you pretty-printed XML with "+" and "-" links to view or hide selected parts. Alternatively the XML-source can be viewed using the "view source" feature of the browser, or after saving the XML file locally, with a program of choice. If you directly read the XML source it won't be difficult to find the actual wikitext. If you don't use a special XML editor "<" and ">" appear as &lt; and &gt;, to avoid a conflict with XML tags; to avoid ambiguity, "&" is coded as "&amp;".

In the current version the export format does not contain an XML replacement of wiki markup (see Wikipedia DTD for an older proposal, or Wiki Markup Language). You only get the wikitext as you get when editing the article. (After export you can use alternative parsers to convert wikitext to other format)

Example

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   xml:lang="en">
    
      </span>Page<span class="w" id="mwWg"> </span>title<span class="nt" id="mwWw">
      
      0
      2
      
       title="Redirect page title" />
      edit=sysop:move=sysop
      
        2001-01-15T13:15:00Z
        
          Foobar
          65536
        
        I have just one thing to say!
        A bunch of [[text]] here.
         />
      
      
        2001-01-15T13:10:27Z
        10.0.0.2
        new!
        An earlier [[revision]].
      
      
        
        4557485
        1243372
        2010-06-24T02:40:22Z
         deleted="deleted" />
        wikitext
        text/x-wiki
         deleted="deleted" />
        
      
    
    
    
      </span>Talk:Page<span class="w" id="mw0w"> </span>title<span class="nt" id="mw1A">
      
        2001-01-15T14:03:00Z
        10.0.0.2
        hey
        WHYD YOU LOCK PAGE??!!! i was editing that jerk

DTD

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Here is an unofficial, short Document Type Definition version of the format. If you don't know what a DTD is just ignore it.

 mediawiki (siteinfo?,page*)>

 mediawiki
  version  CDATA  #REQUIRED 
  xmlns CDATA #FIXED "http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.3/"
  xmlns:xsi CDATA #FIXED "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation CDATA #FIXED
    "http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.3/ http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.3.xsd"
>
 siteinfo (sitename,base,generator,case,namespaces)>
 sitename (#PCDATA)>      
 base (#PCDATA)>          
 generator (#PCDATA)>     
 case (#PCDATA)>          
   
 namespaces (namespace+)> 
   namespace (#PCDATA)>     
   namespace key CDATA #REQUIRED> 
 page (title,id?,restrictions?,(revision|upload)*)>
   title (#PCDATA)>         
   id (#PCDATA)> 
   restrictions (#PCDATA)>  
 revision (id?,timestamp,contributor,minor?,comment,text)>
   timestamp (#PCDATA)>     
   minor EMPTY>             
   comment (#PCDATA)> 
   text (#PCDATA)>          
   text xml:space CDATA  #FIXED "preserve">
 contributor ((username,id) | ip)>
   username (#PCDATA)>
   ip (#PCDATA)>
 upload (timestamp,contributor,comment?,filename,src,size)>
   filename (#PCDATA)>
   src (#PCDATA)>
   size (#PCDATA)>

Processing XML export

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Many tools can process the exported XML. If you process a large number of pages (for instance a whole dump) you probably won't be able to get the document in main memory so you will need a parser based on SAX or other event-driven methods.

You can also use regular expressions to directly process parts of the XML code. These run fast but are difficult to maintain.

Please list methods and tools for processing XML export here:

Details and practical advice

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  • To determine the namespace of a page you have to match its title to the prefixed defined in

/mediawiki/siteinfo/namespaces/namespace

  • Possible restrictions are
    • sysop (protected pages)

See also

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Wikipedia-specific help

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