Marspedia:Wikipedia Import

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This article describes the process of importing content from Wikipedia. It is important when doing this that we must comply with the Creative Commons license which Wikipedia content has, which requires proper attribution. The commonly-accepted way to do this, is to import the history of the article from Wikipedia, to ensure that all contributors of the article are properly attributed.

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...