McD
I have spent probably 30% of the past 2 weeks playing with Special:Import
and large scale importing. I have managed to create @30k relatively complex
interlinked pages all from Access. They include templates, categories, Gmap
integration and more.
If you create a single sample page in MW and export it you will see the
format expected at the point of Import. From that point forward it is simply
a case of working out what is static (same for EVERY page) and what is
dynamic (specific to each page). You can then arrange/export the data from
Excel, interspersed with cells that contain the static data. Personally I
find Access easier for this work but if you need more pointers or samples of
the queries I have been using just shout.
When you commence the import process be sure to strip any problem characters
FIRST. i.e. Replace any ampersands (&) with & etc. A failed import is a
pain as it means you need to do some house work to see what went in Ok and
what didn't. Cleanest thing to do is delete the import and do it again once
you have removed the offending characters.
If you go for a large import (say >1.5MB) you will need to check the
search_index table to ensure everything imported correctly. I have had
several instances where I got too near to the 2MB mark when the Page table
populated bu the search_index didn't. This means the pages are they but you
cant find them!
Oh, by the way, the Revision_ID can be set to a fixed digit for all imports.
I set all mine to 1 to show 1 revision (the import).
Good luck,
Paul
On 3/3/07 2:34 PM, "Michael Dreimiller" <mcd(a)dreimiller.com> wrote:
I've got a Excel spreadsheet containing two
columns of data - the
first is a list of names and the second is plain text data associated
with each name - that I would like to import into my MediaWiki
database, creating articles for each name with the data in the second
column as the content for each article. Is there a way to do an
import like that? All I've been able to find is Special:Import which
only works with the XML files created using Special:Export. I thought
about reformatting my data in the XML format used by the
Special:Export function but I don't know how I would handle some of
the fields like ID and Revision ID which I assume are unique and
automatically assigned.
-McD-
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