This is posted here for the foundation to consider rather than on Wikitech as these issues affect the credibility of the Foundation. Posts on these issues to Wikitech get ignored and/or are not responded to at all. I am writing this in response to requests to GFDL enable the wikigadugi.org sites. I am unable to complete the process at present because of severe problems with MediaWiki and the Foundations dumps. I have an extensive set of tools for mirroring wikipedia and they work very well, provided I spend a lot of needless time cleaning up after the MediaWiki developers.

1. The current Mediawiki releases have had breakage with importDump.php since 1.7. I have been unable to make any progress in getting complete runs of the Foundation XML dumps to post without modification to MediaWiki and/or writing programs to clean up NULL titles and other problems with the dumps. Bottom line is that the mediaWiki software DOES NOT WORK with standard XML dumps provided by the foundation AT ALL through its sites, despite the Foundation's clear messages this is in fact the case. This harms the reputation and credibility of the Foundation. It needs to be addressed and fixed.

2. mwdumper does not import the dumps. It processes the files and NOTHING shows up in the database. If these tools do not work, the Meta pages discussing them should say so and the programs should be removed and/or other alternatives suggested or a disclaimer should be placed there that states this. As it stands, the information is misleading and results in a lot of folks wasting a lot of time trying to make tools work which clearly do not. I have found dozens of blog entries and bug reports on these issues and the developers ignore them.

3. The Foundation needs to ask Brion Vibber and the developers to cease posting dumps which are incompatible with MediaWiki releases and which the developers KNOW do not work and force compliance of these processes and mediaWiki compatibility.

In other words, I do not think its too much to ask that the XML dumps posted by the Foundation work with the released MediaWiki versions. It needs to be mandated and complinace required. At present, you almost need a degree in advanced computer science to be able to fix this stuff. I have spent several weekends debugging Brion's PHP code and writing programs to correct these issues just so I can run import on the latest dumps. It would be much nicer if this stuff just worked.

Posts and emails to Wikitech are typically ignored on a lot of these issues. They need to be elevated and corrected.

Jeff