Daniel Barrett wrote:
What is the current best practice for moving all
images from one
wiki "A" into a second, ACTIVE wiki "B"? Requirements are:
1. Detect any image naming collisions between the two wikis,
and resolve them before import 2. Transfer all "File:..."
pages from wiki "A" into wiki "B", including their revision history
3. Transfer all images from wiki "A" into wiki "B", including
all old versions
Is /maintenance/importImages.php is the right tool? I could
imagine finding all images in the /images folder and feeding them
to importImages.php. Will that work together with importing all
"File:..." pages from wiki "A" into wiki "B" via
/maintenance/importDump.php? (It won't import all revisions of
each image however....)
importImages.php will not meet your requirements.
Or could we simply copy the /images folder from the
first wiki to
the second (using ordinary filesystem copy operations), and then
use /maintenance/importDump.php to import the entire "File:"
namespace from the first wiki into the second? Do all the hashed
image file paths get preserved and continue to work?
That would overwrite files with the same name, instead of dealing with
conflicts in any sensible manner. And you would also need to copy the
contents of the image and oldimage tables in the database.
Or is there a better method? Remember that wiki
"B" is active and
not a new, empty wiki.
I don't think there is any maintenance script which does what you need
to do. Similar image move operations from the Wikipedias to Wikimedia
Commons were just done using semi-automated client-side scripts, with
image history not preserved.
There are a number of MediaWiki developers who may be able to write
such a script for you, for a fee. Alternatively, you could reduce your
requirements -- importImages.php will work well enough if you don't
need to preserve the image upload history or old versions.
-- Tim Starling