Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
The importing of the 20060911 XML dumps produces a lot of garbage in the output of importDump.php in MediaWiki 1.7.1
That's normal.
(in additional to running about 50 times slower that 1.6.8 during import of XML dumps 1.6.8 avg is 56 pages/second, 1.7.1 is .8 pages/second):
importDump renders pages in order to update link tables. This makes it much slower, but makes the import process work completely.
If you are doing a clean import of a large, complete wiki, importDump.php is of course very inefficient. Use mwdumper for large, fast imports of a complete wiki's page data and import the other SQL tables alongside it.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)