I have a local mediawiki installation and I'm trying to import the Nov 2016 en-wikipedia into it
(enwiki-20161101-pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz)

I'm using importDump.php, but the commands I try cause it to immediately fall over with an error message. When I do:

$ php importDump.php < ~/data/wikifork/enwiki-20161101-pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2

I get:

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): uploadsource://405216067937ad302ddd05631e3ee446:1: parser error : Document is empty in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 538

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): BZh91AY&SY귟C in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 538

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): ^ in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 538

[651d62f6f956c1552494dab7] [no req] MWException from line 542 of /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php: Expected <mediawiki> tag, got

Backtrace:

#0 /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/maintenance/importDump.php(318): WikiImporter->doImport()

#1 /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/maintenance/importDump.php(277): BackupReader->importFromHandle(resource)

#2 /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/maintenance/importDump.php(108): BackupReader->importFromStdin()

#3 /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/maintenance/doMaintenance.php(111): BackupReader->execute()

#4 /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/maintenance/importDump.php(323): require_once(string)

#5 {main}

And when I do:

$ php importDump.php --conf ../LocalSettings.php ~/data/wikifork/enwiki-20161101-pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2 my_wiki

I get:

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): uploadsource://cd1f7162d36eda06a29d64becaf0b825:45: parser error : Extra content at the end of the document in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 512

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): </siteinfo> in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 512

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): ^ in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 512

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): Load Data before trying to read in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 603

PHP Warning: XMLReader::read(): Load Data before trying to read in /home/phil/sproj/wikifork/mediawiki/includes/import/WikiImporter.php on line 578

Done!

You might want to run rebuildrecentchanges.php to regenerate RecentChanges

I'm puzzled that I'm getting different error messages here.