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
edit- 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
user), copy therootimportWikispaces.php
file to a MediaWiki installation'smaintenance
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
edit- Features:
- WYSIWYG editor -> Extension:VisualEditor
- Picture and File Manager -> VisualEditor uploads?
- Easy Linking -> VisualEditor / Extension:WikiEditor
- Search -> built-in or Extension:CirrusSearch
- File search:
- Office files (MS/OoO) -> ???
- PDF -> Extension:PdfHandler
- File search:
- Easy backup: -> ???
- Discussion forums -> Extension:StructuredDiscussions?
- Wikispam Protection -> Manual:Combating spam
- Web Folders (WebDAV) -> ???
- Math Formulas -> Extension:Math
- Most other mentioned features are suported by MediaWiki out of the box.
- Wikitext features:
- basic text formatting, links, anchors, images, tables are supported by default MediaWiki (see Manual:Configuring file uploads).
- Syntax highlighting → Extension:SyntaxHighlight
- References → Extension:Cite (uses same syntax)
- RSS feeds → Extension:RSS
- Variables → Help:Magic words
- Including the contents of another wiki page -> Help:Templates
- Mathematics → Extension:Math
- Widgets → Extension:Widgets
- Collaborative learning features:
- Projects -> ??? (SMW?)
- Events -> SMW?
- User creator -> ???
- Assessment -> Extension:WatchAnalytics?
- Annotations / inline commets -> not currently supported (T185607)
- Discussions -> talk pages, Extension:CommentStreams
- Statistics -> Extension:Google Analytics Integration or Extension:Piwik Integration?