I've been meaning to document this for a while.
If you're finding yourself visiting Special:Export/Import often for the
purpose of MediaWiki development there is a much better way to get content
into your local wiki for testing purposes.
This short video explains how MobileFrontend extension provides tooling to
help you debug live on-wiki content via $wgMFContentProviderClass [1]
https://youtu.be/uRQzjN0hBlY
Hope it saves someone lots of time!
[1]
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-MobileFrontend/blob/maste…
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Jon Robson
Senior Software Engineer