I tested Special:Import on
test.leuksman.com yesterday. While it
certainly has improved I sure hope that it will NOT be enabled on the
Wikimedia servers in its current state.
It is very easy (for admins) to falsify (with the file upload feature)
or just mess up article histories and user contributions, and since
imports are not logged there's no way to keep track of it.
I don't fear that we have many rogue admins that would try to abuse the
feature, but you don't have to be rogue to make a mess. Since the
contributors (/authors) of an imported article are treated as they were
local you can create a real mess of user contributions.
On no.wikipedia and nn.wikipedia there are for example two different
active users called "Jhs". If I were to import an article contributed
by "Jhs" from no.wikipedia to nn.wikipedia, it would show up in Jhs's
user contributions on nn.wikipedia, even though that user never wrote
anything like it.
In its current state I would say that for license complience it is also
inferior to manual import, since it does not point to the source of the
article in any way, just to a non-existent user (as far as I can
understand). And since the default is to only export (and thus import)
the last revision, only one contributor is attributed.
--Guttorm Flatabø
(user:dittaeva)