Marspedia:Wikipedia Import

When getting free content from Wikipedia and other GFDL licensed sources, it is important to comply with the requirements of the GNU Free Document License.

These articles CAN NOT be legally placed in Marspedia's main namespace as it is reserved for public domain content. This content is not ours to release in such a capacity.

It is also critical to continue credit for the multiple contributors whose iterative efforts built up the article. The most feasible method of doing this from a MediaWiki source is no export and then import the article. Note that only sysops have the power to import articles to Marspedia.

If you are not a sysop, please send a message to a recently active sysop requesting that they import the article for you. As of this writing, most registered users of Marspedia have sysop capabilities.

Exporting the article

Select the Wikipedia article. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1

The name of the article in this case is Viking 1

On the left side below the search box where it says 'toolbox' look for 'Special pages.' Click on that, then click on the link where it says 'export pages.'

...or go to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export

Type in the name of the article, in this case, Viking 1

IMPORTANT: UNCHECK the box that reads 'Include only the current revision, not the full history' -- leaving this checked defeats the entire purpose of exporting it and hacking on the xml file.

Click on the Export button.

In your web browser, select 'save page as.' and save the file to disk with an appropriate filename (such as WikipediaViking1.xml).

Editing the file

Open the file in your preferred text editor. Search for the first instance of <title>. You should see:

<title>Viking 1</title>

Change that to

<title>GFDL:Viking 1</title>

Save (as text file with extension .xml, probably the same filename).

Now you're ready to import.

Importing the file to a new article

On the left side below the search box where it says 'toolbox' look for 'Special pages.' Click on that, then click on the link where it says 'Import pages' below Restricted special pages.

...Or go here: http://marspedia.org/index.php?title=Special:Import

Click on the Browse button or paste the path and filename into the import box.

If all went well, you should see:

Importing pages...

• GFDL:Viking 1 100 revision(s)

Import succeeded!

You can now go to: http://marspedia.org/index.php?title=GFDL:Viking_1