If you happen to pick Python, you could grab the Python robot framework from http://pywikipediabot.sourceforge.net, tweak it, and then run touch.py -file:file, where the file contains a list of the imported article names - this too could be generated by your script.
There's also a bot for Perl, but you may just want to take the lazier option; run the maintenance script for rebuilding link tables.
Rob Church
On 09/12/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/12/05, HumanCell .org humancell@gmail.com wrote:
I'd like to import a public database into my mediawiki, where each *row* of the database corresponds to a new article.
Here's a simple example to clarify:
ID Name Height Weight Row1 fred 150 100 Row2 bill 210 55
Well, since I just mentionned the XML import format in another posting (there's a schema and example in the 'docs/' directory of the source), here's a proposal using that:
- write a script in your language of choice that queries the
database, and formats each row into something along the lines of: <page><title>$name</title><revision><text>{{my infobox|height=$height|weight=$weight}}</text></revision></page> [this isn't actually valid, e.g. you need a timestamp and user etc in the revision; these could be constants in your program though]
- create the page [[Template:My infobox]] (or whatever you actually
want to call it) with appropriate stuff
- go to Special:Import while logged in as a sysop, and import your
new XML file. Ta-da! A whole lotta new articles!
Alternatively, of course, you could write something that read from one database and wrote to the other, but this way has the advantage that most of the leg-work is done by existing MediaWiki code, and you don't have to work out how. Except, unfortunately, it won't update the tables used by "whatlinkshere" and co - see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2483 (they'll be updated as soon as you edit each page, probably even if you do a "null edit" that doesn't actually save any changes)
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP] _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l