Manual:Importing Wikipedia infoboxes tutorial

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This tutorial outlines steps to import infoboxes used by Wikipedia.

Prerequisites

Before using this tutorial, you should familiarize yourself with the MediaWiki features it will be utilizing:

• meta:Help:Export
• meta:Help:Import
• Help:Editing pages
• Help:Templates
• Manual:Using content from Wikipedia
• Wikipedia infoboxes
• Designing infoboxes

You must also have these extensions installed, setup and working:

• Extension:ParserFunctions

Steps

Step 1: Determine info boxes needed

• Find all infoboxes used on Wikipedia at w:Category:Infobox templates
• If there's an info box being used in a Wikipedia article you'd like to import:
  • Visit the page's edit screen
  • Scroll to the bottom and find the appropriate page name for the infobox template you'd like to import

Step 2: Export Wikipedia templates

• Go to Wikipedia's Special:Export page and enter the full page names of the infobox templates from step 1.
• For your first infobox to work, you'll also need to include the master infobox template, Template:Infobox
• Be sure to check the Include templates checkbox to include other necessary templates
• Most templates put their documentation in a subpage, so you may want to include /doc subpage for each template you're importing
  • Example: for Template:Infobox you should also download Template:Infobox/doc

Step 3: Import infobox templates

• Go to your wiki's Special:Import page and select the file you created from the export in step 2.

Step 4: De-Wikipediaify

• You may want to review all of the files that you just imported for references to Wikipedia pages.
• You can certainly leave them in place - and are encouraged to update them as links to the appropriate Wikipedia article (possibly using interwiki links)
• Pay special attention to categories, which may be buried in the template's code, and may include reference to Wikipedia
  • Again, you can leave them, but you may wish to update them to your wiki's name or categorization policy

Step 5: Additional templates needed

• Once your import is complete, you should check the template on your wiki to see if it functions correctly
• A helpful step is to once again refer to the edit page's templates list
  • If there are redlinks, go back to step 2 and repeat this process to import the missing templates

Step 6: Enjoy success

That's it! Enjoy your infoboxes!

See also

• Manual:Importing XML dumps