[Mediawiki-l] Syntax for Importing XML

[Brion Vibber]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:52 PM, mrthetooth <mrthetooth at burningsea.com>wrote:

> I'm trying to use Special:Import to create several pages at once.  The
> catch is that these are brand-new pages that were not exported from another
> wiki.  The XML syntax seems pretty straight forward, but I had a few
> questions.
> [snip]
> My question is when importing a brand-new page what should I put for the
> page id and what should I put for the revision id?  Or if I leave these
> fields out, will MediaWiki create default values?
>

You can safely leave them out. When using Special:Import, any ID numbers
listed in the XML data will actually be ignored; pages and revisions will
receive their own local ID numbers when saved in the local database.

The page, revision, and user ID fields are in the export for reference, and
for bulk dump/restore tools that operate on full-site data dumps as they may
need to reproduce the original site's ID values for convenience of data
processing. Important if you're restoring a site backup or processing a
Wikipedia data download, but safely ignorable for your case. :D

-- brion