Wikispaces

Wikispaces was a MediaWiki-based wiki farm, with a focus on K-12 education. It was one of the major wiki hosts, claiming to have over 1.5 million wikis and 10 million users. It had a mix of free and paid plans. The site closed down in 2018 (on July 31 for free wikis, at the end of the year for paid ones), leaving most of those users scrambling for a new host to migrate to.

Migration tools

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  • importWikispaces.php is a migration script in the form of a MediaWiki maintenance script; it can import pages with full history, users and images and files. Run it as the user running the Apache server on a machine with MediaWiki installed (typically the apache user, probably not the root user), copy the importWikispaces.php file to a MediaWiki installation's maintenance directory, and issue the following:
sudo -u apache php /path/to/importWikispaces.php --user <Wikispaces username> --password <Wikispaces password> --spacename <Wikispaces space name> --history --use-timestamp
Apparently in the current form only works with paid spaces and has a couple shortcomings - see discussion here.
  • The export functionality for Wikispaces supports MediaWiki as an output language. That results in a bunch of textfiles, plus images, plus discussions in some JSON format.
    • vermuz/wikimediawikiscripts is a Python script (written a couple years ago) to preprocess Wikispace export files so they can be mass-imported into MediaWiki. nanotube/wikispacestomediawiki (features) is a companion script that does markup conversion; unclear if it's better than getting the export in MediaWiki format in the first place.

Also, some wiki hosts claim to do the migration for you: CiviHosting ([1]), MyWikis ([2]), QualityBox

Feature matching

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Wikimatrix comparison.

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