This is a work in progress quick hack, written in Python.

This script migrates content in MediaWiki to Markdown, preserving the edit history as git commits, for display on GitHub pages using Jekyll:

https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages/

The idea here is to first prepare a MediaWiki XML dump of the current wiki contents (including revisions of the current pages), and turn each revision into a separate git commit of the page converted into markdown using pandoc.

This uses a crude Python script (calling pandoc and git). It assumes it is running in the base folder of a git repository on a suitable branch to which it will commit back-dated changes as markdown files.

Pages which were deleted on the wiki (e.g. spam) are not wanted (and appear to be excluded from the export XML file).

The user should provide a manual mapping table of MediaWiki usernames (column one) to names and email address as used for their GitHub accounts (column two), e.g.:

AnOther (tab) A. N. Other <[email protected]>

Spam revisions (and non-rollback reverts) are also not wanted, and can be ignored via a blacklist file of usernames (one per line). This means not every wiki revision will become a git commit. See helper script extract_blocklist.py for pulling the names of blocked users from an HTML download of the wiki's Special:BlockList page.

It is also worth double checking the first run's output for any reverts which could indicate additional accounts to block:

$ git log | grep "Reverted edits by "

Also, some revisions making minor changes to the wiki formatting may result in no changes to the converted markdown, and therefore ideally will not result in a git commit.

An early Python 2 only version of the script was used for the BioJava wiki https://biojava.org which is now hosted at https://github.com/biojava/biojava.github.io

A later Python 2 version of the script (with support for slashes in wiki page names) was used for the Biopython wiki https://biopython.org which is now hosted at https://github.com/biopython/biopython.github.io

This was then labelled v1.0.0 in January 2024, and work done to support Python 3 becoming v1.1.0.

The script used for https://github.com/OBF/wiki in converting the legacy OBF wiki https://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Main_Page in Feb 2024 was labelled as v2.0.0, and the XML dump is available here as a test case (127MB; CC-BY 4.0 licensed):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/edp7ukdhg2onls7/obf_mediawiki_dump_2024-02-05.xml.bz2?dl=0

• Add a proper command line API exposing options
• Squash quick series of git commits from single author to a single page (with same or no comment)?
• Skip git commits where there was no change in the markdown
• Post-process pandoc output to fix wiki-links?

We use the dumpBackup.php script, the manual for this is online at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:dumpBackup.php

First, log into your mediawiki instance and find the PHP file .../maintenance/dumpBackup.php and your ../LocalSettings.php file. Then try:

$ cd ~
$ php .../maintenance/dumpBackup.php --conf .../LocalSettings.php --full --include-files --uploads > mediawiki_dump.xml

Note the inclusion of --include-files --uploads to ensure the log includes all the images etc.

Assuming you are running the conversion into MarkDown locally, zip-up and scp the XML dump back to your machine.

You can save the HTML page of your wiki's Special:BlockList page and parse it with:

$ curl -o blocklist.html "https://example.org/w/index.php/Special:BlockList?wpTarget=&limit=500"

Then run the script from this repository to pull out the user names:

$ ../mediawiki_to_git_md/extract_blocklist.py blocklist.html
Parse saved HTML file of wiki/Special:BlockList into simple text file
Extracted 50 users from 'blocklist.html' into 'user_blocklist.txt'

You will need to fill this in, try the conversion once to see which names to focus on collecting:

$ emacs usernames.txt

This is a simple two column tab separated table, mapping MediaWiki usernames (column one) to names and email address as used for their GitHub accounts (column two), e.g.:

AnOther (tab) A. N. Other <[email protected]>

Now run the conversion in your GitHub Pages repository, where git is already on the right branch and ready for new commits to be made:

$ ../mediawiki_to_git_md/xml_to_git.py -i mediawiki_dump.xml
============================================================
Parsing XML and saving revisions by page.
============================================================
Sorting changes by revision date...
...

If it works, it will print a summary of the missing usernames which you should probably add to usernames.txt and then after resetting your branches, retry the conversion. e.g.:

$ git checkout pre_auto_import && git branch -D master && git checkout -b master
Switched to branch 'pre_auto_import'
Deleted branch master (was a348cc5).
Switched to a new branch 'master'

By default most converted pages are assigned the Jekyll layout wiki which assumes you have defined _layouts/wiki.html as a template. This can be changed, e.g, to None to use the default layout.

However, Category:XXX pages are instead mapped to layout tagpage, and given tag XXX. This assumes you have defined _layouts/tagpage.html which will add the automatic listing of all pages with the tag XXX. We use tags since Jekyll does not allow multiple categories per page like MediaWiki.

See Biopython's wiki template and tagpage template for examples. Note the later includes automatically generated links to all the pages with that tag.