[Foundation-l] Enabling import from en.wp to en.wb

[Luiz Augusto]

Request to a dev, lots of Wikisource wikis have Special:Import enabled (see
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Subdomains_coordination ) in request
based mode.

On 9/10/06, John McC <sb_johnny at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm curious why the import function is not currently
> enabled from between these two projects.
>
> en.wikipedia has a strictly enforced policy of
> deleting articles with "how-to" materials, and/or
> removing sections of articles containing this sort of
> information. See, for example, this category:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_containing_how-to_sections
>
> I also remember seeing quite a few articles on the AfD
> pages which were decided as "Delete/transwiki to
> wikibooks", but don't seem to have shown up on the
> transwiki log at wikibooks (though some are simply
> copied directly to a main namespace location).
>
> The current system just seems broken, for several
> reasons:
>
> 1) Many articles that *are* transwikied end up being
> moved without edit histories, and in one case I had to
> get a WP admin to undelete a series of articles and
> provide the histories.
>
> 2) We (as in the wikibooks admin staff) have no idea
> if new modules (i.e., books or chapters) are
> transwikied or not. We can often make a good guess if
> a new module has a million red links in it, but even
> so this doesn't necessarily tell us where it came
> from.
>
> 3) The current copy/paste method is just unwieldy and
> time consuming. Is there any real reason the import
> function shouldn't be enabled (I've used it on
> wikiversity, and it's quite graceful and easy to use).
>
>
> 4) Many of the articles that are marked as having
> how-to sections contain only a slice of information
> about a topic that might be part of a larger text, and
> stubs just aren't very appropriate to the structure of
> wikibooks. For example, I recently transwikied
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery from
> wikipedia, then placed it in an otherwise empty book
> called Battery Power (
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Battery_Power ). To
> provide structure for filling out the book, it would
> be nice to be able to transwiki related articles (see
> table of contents of the book), which may or may not
> currently contain how-to information, in order to have
> something to build from. (The book could be useful for
> emergency preparedness, energy independence,
> electronics, etc.). This would be much easier to do
> using the import tool.
>
> I'm curious whether there's any strong arguments
> against doing this, or if not, perhaps it could be
> enabled?
>
> -Johnny
>
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