We resolved this on the Wikibase telegram chat.
For anyone finding this email thread, here is a rough log of the chat....
Miquel Farre
I just wrote to the wikidata-tech mail list asking for the question regarding the load of dumps
https://t.me/c/1478172663/1845if somebody here is professionally consulting around wikidata/wikibase and would be able to help writing fixes to those problems, we could study how to sponsor it. Please let me know.
Addshore
I just scrolled up and it looks like it is a namespace issue
Wikidata has namespace 0 (the main namespace) being wikidaa items,.
On a default install of wikibase the item namespace is 120, and 0 is a wikitext namespace
Either you'll have to configure your wikibase to be the same as Wikidata, or run something through the dump to change the namespace.
I'm not sure there is anything built into the import process for XML for converting namespaces, I'll have a quick look, could be a good feature thoigh
Miquel Farre
regarding the namespace issue, can I just add this config:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Installation/Advanced_configuration#Items_in_a_dedicated_item_namespace chaning $baseNs = 0 ?
Addshore
Yes, so if you look in the example settings you can find the rather verbose example of how to do this
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Wikibase/blob/master/repo/config/Wikibase.example.php#L28-L44defining $baseNs in local settings will not work, but defining those other things after you load the default settings will work
changing this on an already existing wikibase might have unexpected consequences, and is not advised, but doing this on an empty one should be fine :)
Miquel Farre
Adam, this is working, I can load a dump 🙂