MoinMoin to MediaWiki Conversion

[Andrew McMillan]

On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 12:04 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 08:38:51PM +0200, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > Hi,
> > As you may have noticed, our website is pretty crap.  I had fairly grand
> > plans to fix it, but the current spam influx with Moin has drained any
> > will I had to work on it, and realistically, I'm overcommitted anyway.
> > 
> > So, does anyone want to work on the website? It looks like an ideal
> > solution will involve moving away from Moin, as well as properly
> > namespacing a lot of stuff, cleaning everything up, doing a tiny bit of
> > design work to make it look good, and generally making it something
> > people will want to work with to improve, rather than just battle
> > against.
> 
> Would mediawiki be an option?  I set up mediawiki for Inkscape
> (http://wiki.inkscape.org) which has turned out quite nicely.
> 
> We had some spam issues at first, but I tightened up the settings and
> installed a couple spam plugins, and we've not really had any issues
> since (see RecentChanges).  I added a few moderators who take care of
> the oddball stuff that slips through, but otherwise it's been
> maintenance-free for me.  It's also proven to be quite ameniable to
> theming.  There seems to be quite a bit of experienced mediawiki users
> out there to make good use of its features, too.
> 
> Anyway, my time's also pretty limited, but I've set up many mediawiki's,
> and I think this is something that'd pay off well - I'm frequently
> looking for X.org info that *ought* to be on wiki.x.org but isn't.  :-)

Hi,

We're in the process of converting an internal MoinMoin wiki (roughly
3500 pages) to Mediawiki and have found a couple of tools to help do the
job.  Unfortunately both tools we have found aren't very complete (one
in Perl & one in Python) so I have someone working on enhancing them and
that should be in a releasable state in about a week.

Code for the work is in our public Git repository here:

http://git.catalyst.net.nz/gw/moin2media.git

This is based on an original conversion program by Jeff Licquia, merged
to use the Wiki parser from MoinMoin itself, which builds a MediaWiki
export format XML file.  This is combined with some additional code (in
Ruby) to handle splitting / uploading of that file because it turns out
to be too large to do in one hit.

Later on this week we'll be publishing some more detailed usage
instructions and so forth, but it seems timely to at least mention the
existence of this in case there is a decision to switch from MoinMoin.

Regards,
					Andrew McMillan.

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