Matthew Flaschen wrote: Here you go: 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

Brion Vibber wrote: The traces are posted to wikitech you asked for Brion a very long time ago. This statement is simply not accurate. Exhibit A http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2402 Please fix your code Brion. People are seeing it, you just ignore them. Jeff

Leon Weber wrote: If it is, its one sided. I have no personal issues with Brion. I'm just a MediaWiki user and this is a quality issue. I would agree Brion appears to have some personal issue, but this is simply reports of bugs and issues which have been floating for over a year and have not been closed. Jeff

Domas Mituzas wrote: I am happy to post them. Jeff

Now try it with one of the huge enwiki dumps with all the stuff on the talk pages on 1.5 mediawiki that's gone through 1 year on the internet with database upgrades through 1.8.2 and tell me if it still works (will take 2-3 days to run with the enwiki dumps even on a fast system). I have installed applicances in the field and folks are coming back about this issue a lot when they try to use various XML dumps from the Foundation. When mediawiki gets into low memory conditions of any kind, the wheels fly off when imports, reading, and editing or going on at the same time. Jeff Kasimir Gabert wrote:

Kasimir Gabert wrote: I created Local Area Networking my friend. I think I know if a system works or not. I have. Go back and read this list for the traces posted. The imports bugs have a large number of pages on google about this and a lot of other places.

Hello, I imported the dump from enwikibooks to test.kgprog.com and it worked perfectly. This is not one of the smaller wikis and it has just confirmed my belief that Wikimedia dumps work. If you can demonstrate with a specific example what your error is, and provide the appropriate parts of the xml file, then I am sure that the developers will look at your case seriously. Kasimir On 2/24/07, Kasimir Gabert <kasimir.g(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Kasimir Gabert

And here is another good one to look into on this problem. The enwiki-20070206 imports FAIL with reports of "NULL title detected" when running importDump.php from 1.8.2. The problem is, there are NO NULL titles contained in this XML file. I have a tool that strips out the titles from the dumps for translation and link grammar parsing. These tools do not affect or alter the enwiki xml file at all but simply READ FROM IT, I just use them to strip out the article titles. Here is the output for the enwiki dump when article titles have been striped and redirected to a file. There is not a single NULL title or revision in the entire XMl Dump. This SAME UNMODIFIED DUMP FROM THE FOUNDATION crashes in importDump complaining of NULL titles when THERE ARE NO NULL TITLES IN THE DUMP AT ALL. Stripped Titles enwiki-20070206: ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/xml/titles-enwiki-20070206.txt.bz2 importDump.php Logs with crash and BOGUS NULL title error importing enwiki-20070206: ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/xml/log-enwiki-20070206.txt.bz2 Jeff

Greg Sabino Mullane wrote: I have a "+" character in wgLegalTitleChars for hthe URL/space expansion thing when I see the problem. I am re-running the importdump with tracing enabled and a debug log. The log is HUGE so far. When it crashes again, I'll post the log. Jeff

Jeff V. Merkey wrote: I hope you understand dumps are not a requirement for the GFDL. Special:Export and indeed the XHTML pages themselves count as transparent copies. No, it should be fixed, but it doesn't need to be. Wikimedia has no obligation to provide dumps, working or otherwise. That's true. Matthew Flaschen