User talk:Graham87/Import

Pardon my ignorance

But may I ask where the "here" is you plan to import these edits to, and why? Thanks Aquib 16:32, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I plan to import these edits to any page on Wikipedia that needs them, so histories of pages on Wikipedia contain as much information as possible. Graham87 06:43, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Oh you are populating the page history, that's interesting, thanks. PS think I got my signature fixed thanks for the tip Aquib (talk) 02:36, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the great work! Have you talked to Magnus Manske about this? From the enthusiasm he still has about his groundwork with MediaWiki 9 years ago, he should really appreciate your import work. Deryck C. 08:27, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

No, I haven't ... that sounds like a good idea though! Graham87 15:38, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

I've just sent him an email. Graham87 16:10, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Bash

What were you fixing? From the diff, I don't see any changes. What am I missing, please? Msnicki (talk) 08:48, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I imported this edit. See the user page for why the diff is the way it is. Graham87 14:29, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Gladiator

Could you explain on the talk page exactly what you did to Gladiator? I'm confused about this importing procedure. Cynwolfe (talk) 13:46, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Apologies for my stupidity, but I still don't get it. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:34, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I've responded there. Graham87 05:35, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks and Clarification Request

I saw a strange looking entry in a page history and clicked on the link to User:Graham87/Import to see what it was. This is a really nice thing you are doing. Thanks!

It was not clear from reading User:Graham87/Import that current content is not being changed. The phrase "import old edits that are not in the English Wikipedia database" could be interpreted several ways. May I suggest adding wording such as "this only affects the pre-2001 page history: the current version of the page in unaffected" to make this clear?

Also, have you done your magic on UuU? I find that page to be especially interesting because it is the very first edit done to Wikipedia, so of course the history is especially important. Guy Macon (talk) 19:18, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I've added a sentence like the text that you proposed, but that statement isn't always true. Admittedly, it's correct in all but some bizarre corner cases, but I want to cover all the possible scenarios here. Yes, I've done my magic on UuU. Graham87 06:04, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

You're rebuilding lost portions of article edit histories? The Transhumanist 02:22, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. Graham87 10:20, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Outlines

I spotted some of the same entries as mentioned above in the histories of a couple of the outlines.

You seem very knowledgeable about wikis, and I was wondering if I could pick your brain...

Outlines have 2 main purposes:

1) To improve awareness of the subject rapidly (providing topic identification, and structure based on relationships between subtopics such as parent-offspring relationships).

2) To aid navigation of the subject

My question is this:

In regards to the purposes mentioned above, how can outline's effectiveness be improved?

I look forward to your reply. The Transhumanist 02:22, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't know. To be honest, I don't find outlines useful at all. Graham87 10:20, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

heh

Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles, isn't that article a bit outdated? XD mabdul 15:24, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Not really. There are many edits from the Nostalgia Wikipedia that don't need to be imported here at all. Graham87 08:54, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

translation import

I have two questions to you: If somebody is creating a translation and placing the Template:Translated page on the talkpage, then shouldn't the history be imported to fullfill the CC-BY-SA? I know that this is be handled so in the German Wikipedia. And if so, is that task be done by anybody? mabdul 17:55, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it should be, but personally I prefer importing from the Nostalgia Wikipedia; the place to request importation for a particular page is Wikipedia:Requests for page importation. Any admin can import pages from another wiki. Graham87 05:15, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

I have to ask more since I'm really interested in such stuff. The page MediaWiki:Importtext states Please do not attempt to import pages to the English Wikipedia., so I'm a bit confused why the different language Wikipedias have such different policies: I know that the importer right is a separate right and they do import for example the full page hsitory before they translate the page. The page above states that at enwp this shouldn't be done. mabdul 14:21, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

There are two types of imports, transwiki imports, which have been enabled on the English Wikipedia since 2009, and direct imports, where edits are imported from XML files (i.e. the output of Special:Export). I always do transwiki imports, and the MediaWiki message that you linked only refers to direct imports. Graham87 14:33, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

So just to be clear: direct import by uploading a XML file is disabled and only transwiki imports are available? Thanks. mabdul 14:54, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that is correct. Graham87 04:10, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia#Translating from other language Wikimedia Projects indicates that only a link is necessary. Why would we import a possibly large number of foreign-language revisions to clutter our article history? Anomie⚔ 18:18, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

So the revisions are more easily accessible, and an automatic list of *true* authors can be generated from the page history by machines. But see my reply above ... I'm not hellbent on that process, as it causes problems of its own, but I'll do a translation import if I'm asked to. Graham87 03:21, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Please see the comment here: Wikipedia talk:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License#Attribution of material copy-pasted from one wp article into another wp article. What happens if the original source is not longer available? mabdul 12:25, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Importing has both advantages and disadvantages. Importing makes it easier to fulfil attribution requirements in the licences and if the original source goes down it may be the only way to fulfil the licence requirement, but as long as there are any SUL conflicts left, it also means that some edits may be miscredited. I'm known as Stefan2 at English Wikipedia. Sometimes, my edits have been imported to German Wikipedia, and those edits have been assigned to de:User:Stefan2, who is a different person. If edits are imported in the opposite direction, his edits might end up being assigned to me. Personally, I would prefer if Special:Contributions/Stefan2 and Special:DeletedContributions/Stefan2 only contains edits made by me as anything else could cause confusion. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:41, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Please explain what authority do you have to do this?

I am against this process since you indicate that it is not just the talk page that is changed but also the article. It is something new to me and I have always understood that changes should be done the conventional way. I do not think this is acceptable Wikipedia procedure but if I am incorrect, please cite where you have the authority to change article content in a way and a manner different than the usual Wikipedia way and in particular, what changes did you do on Battle of Poitiers article. Thank you. Mugginsx (talk) 16:05, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I have not changed any article content. All I did was copy this edit to the page history of Battle of Poitiers (1356) from the Nostalgia Wikipedia. All administrators are allowed to import edits from other Wikimedia Foundation projects. Graham87 03:35, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanation. I have never seen it before. I don't care what anyone does to the talk page but it seems that all edits, especially simple ones should be done the conventional way. Just my opinion. Mugginsx (talk) 09:17, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

What happened to page move

I tried to move Sutra(with accent) to Sutra and at bottom of move page it was noted that you had moved this already? ThanksIztwoz (talk) 16:53, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I was trying to do an import, but it didn't work. My attempted import would have had no impact on your ability to move the page. You need to go through the requested moves process to get consensus to remove the accent from an article title. Graham87 07:36, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Please don't move articles out of mainspace for history merges

This resets their 'reviewed' state, spamming Special:NewPagesFeed with ancient articles that don't need to be reviewed. You can see complaints about this at Wikipedia talk:Page Curation#Adam and Eve, Wikipedia talk:Page Curation#Weird inclusion in feed list, Wikipedia talk:Page Curation/Archive 2#Graham87.27s Nostalgia Wiki imports, and T48402. Nothing in the History merging instructions mentions anything about moving out of mainspace, and this seems to be a highly irregular way to accomplish the history merge. Kaldari (talk) 23:15, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

The pages need to be moved out of the main namespace because the import feature does not let the user specify a target title, only a target namespace. I'd prefer a little inconvenience in the new pages feed to having to delete and undelete a page to keep the page history clean (which resets its page ID, which is used to determine the order of the "what links here" list, among other things). Graham87 07:40, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Please advise

Hello! You seem to be the Master of Imports, so you can probably help. I might become an administrator on the Finnish Wikisource in a week and I want to import the old history of a page that was copy-pasted from Wikipedia to Wikisource without attribution and deleted from Wikipedia. Do I have to delete the existing target page first in Wikisource before importing the history, or does the import action nicely merge the histories of the two separate articles into one coherent package, or does it completely overwrite the target page and destroy the newer edits in the process. --Pxos (talk) 06:23, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

@Pxos: The import function imports all the edits of a page; it doesn't delete anything, but may cause overlapping histories in your case if the Wikipedia page was edited after the creation of the Wikisource page. If there are overlapping edits between the two pages, I'd import the Wikipedia page to somewhere like the MediaWiki talk namespace (because it's not well-used, move the Wikisource page to that title, history merge the non-overlapping edits from the Wikipedia import, then move the page back to its original location. Hope this makes sense; it's late at night here. Graham87 15:41, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for guidance. The edits do not overlap, however. The page was copypasted to WS and promptly deleted on WP. That is, the deleted Wikipedia page contains revisions that are previous to the first revision on Wikisource. Can I just import the page on top of the existing page (they share the title) without moving anything anywhere in this case? Wikipedia contains revisions A, B and C, and the Wikisource artice now starts at revision D which is a modified copypaste of revision B. I am not going to restore revision C at all on Pedia. Hope this makes sense! --Pxos (talk) 17:36, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Sure! That sounds fine. Graham87 03:24, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

mw:Mentorship programs/Possible projects#Import the very early Usemod edit history of Wikipedia with Parsoid

FYI.[1] --Nemo 09:44, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. Sounds like a potentially awesome idea! Graham87 13:26, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Earliest revisions

Have you considered restoring the first few revisions for their historical value?

e.g. the first edits to HomePage, WikiPedia, PhilosophyAndLogic, AfghanistaN etc.

As you probably know, we still have records of these early edits. I bet it'd be possible to import them. I think that'd be cool. :) 65.26.252.225 (talk) 01:22, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes I have, but they're in an unusual format and aren't easy to import (see the section above). If you're just referring to edits on the Nostalgia Wikipedia, I only import them when they fit in with the current article's history. Graham87 03:42, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Destruction of Nostalgia Wikipedia

Once you have imported all of the important old edits from the Nostalgia Wikipedia, you may then destroy that site so that it displays the 404 error. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:41, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Um, no. Even if I had the power to do that, I most certainly wouldn't. It's an important snapshot of the early history of Wikipedia. Graham87 06:38, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Usernames underlined or with lowercase letters

@Graham87: you may be curious to note that the examples you link to in User:Graham87/Import#Overlapping edits and mismatched titles (or why I make strange page moves) no longer work - both diffs have a username starting with a capitalized letter, and without underscores or underlines. --DannyS712 (talk) 04:38, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

@DannyS712: Wow, that's really weird! I've commented at the relevant Phabicator ticket. Graham87 06:09, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

@Graham87: I saw that (I watch the special pages board) - I agree, it is weird, especially since they don't show up in contribs DannyS712 (talk) 06:11, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

@DannyS712: I've added in a brief explanation based on the Phabricator comment, which I've also linked to. Graham87 09:14, 21 August 2019 (UTC)