Help:Extension:FileImporter/en



The and  extensions aim to make moving files from a local wiki to Wikimedia Commons easier. The new functionality allows to move files with all their original data intact, while documenting the move in the version history.

The provides a link to Wikimedia Commons on the local wiki and hands over a URL to the extension FileImporter. The is a Wikimedia Commons extension which imports the file including all data when all prerequisites are met. Technically, the files won't be "moved", but "copied".

FileImporter has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons in June 2018. FileExporter is deployed and enabled as default feature on all Wikimedia wikis since August 2020.

Background
FileImporter and FileExporter aim to fulfill a request from the German-speaking community's Technical Wishlist and are developed by WMDE's tech team (WikiMedia Deutschland). More information can be found on the main project page on Meta.

Step by step
You need to be logged in in order to use the feature.

How imported files can be found

 * In the revision history of a file, the import is shown as a null revision (i.e. an entry in the revision list that doesn’t actually change the page). If changes were made during import, an additional text revision is created.
 * New revisions that are created during import are tagged with . This way it can be filtered on the recent changes page.
 * Both an upload log entry and an import log entry are created and associated with the null revision and with the importing user, and timestamped with the import date. Having both log entries is the default for uploads, although it might lead to "doubled" entries in recent changes and watchlists, see this [ example file] and its [ log entries].
 * For (old) imported file revisions, upload log entries are created with the date and user of the original upload to make all file revisions appear in Commons' upload log. These revisions are also tagged with.
 * Imported files are marked with an invisible comment that says "This file was moved here using FileImporter from" and mentions the full URL of the source file. CirrusSearch's  feature can be used to find files with this comment, e.g.:  . Note this also finds later derivatives of imported files, but not files where the comment was removed.

How to add categories
The message  (empty by default) can be used to add any additional wikitext to every imported file. The message accepts two parameters:


 * - Full URL of the source file.
 * - Time of the import in ISO 8601, e.g..

For example, to categorize by source wiki, an interface administrator can set the message to, where the invoked Lua module ("Module:Imported with FileImporter" in this example) looks like this:

Deployment roadmap

 * 2018-06-12: Export to test.wikipedia.org
 * FileExporter as a beta feature on mediawiki.org and [//test2.wikipedia.org/ test2.wikipedia.org]. (To test the export, you also need to be an auto-confirmed user on these wikis.)
 * FileImporter on [//test.wikipedia.org/ test.wikipedia.org]
 * 2018-06-25: Export to Wikimedia Commons
 * FileExporter as a beta feature on de.WP, fa.WP, ar.WP
 * exporting from mediawiki.org now to Wikimedia Commons
 * FileImporter on Wikimedia Commons
 * 2018-07-11:
 * FileExporter as a beta feature on [//wikisource.org/ wikisource]
 * 2019-01-16:
 * Deployment of the FileExporter beta feature to all other wikis
 * 2019-09-24:
 * Deployment as a default feature on de.WP, fa.WP, ko.WP, mr.WP and sourceswiki (wikisource.org)
 * 2020-08-05:
 * Deployment as a default feature on all remaining Wikis

Links

 * Main project page on Meta
 * - extension manual
 * - FileImporter configurations
 * - extension manual
 * tag/move-files-to-commons/ - Phabricator project
 * overview: How templates are matched with the FileImporter extension