App/Wiki types/Wikia.com
From XOWA: the free, open-source, offline wiki application
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Nocte Draconis for helping to compile these instructions.
Overview
Wikia.com is a wiki farm with over 370 thousand wikis. Most of the material is made available under a copyleft license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 (Unported) (CC-BY-SA).
As Wikia's wikis run on version 1.19.9 of MediaWiki, it is possible for XOWA to import their database dumps.
The remainder of this walkthrough details the process to import a wiki. It assumes the following:
- A Windows machine with XOWA installed at C:\xowa
- A wikia of dungeons.wikia.com (Dungeons and Dragons)
Feel free to adjust as necessary.
Part 1: Set up the wikia dump
- Create a folder for the wikia dump. For example, C:\xowa\wiki\dungeons.wikia.com
-
Download the dump from http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics If a dump is not available, you can do the following
- Log on to the site as a wikia user (You must create an account if you don't have one)
- Visit http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics You will see a button for "Request a database dump"
- Unzip the dump. You should end up with a file called C:\xowa\wiki\dungeons.wikia.com\dungeons_pages_current.xml
Part 2: Import the wikia dump
- Navigate to Dashboard/Import/Offline
- Change the "Wiki" choice from "Wikipedia" to "Other wiki"
- Change "Where to get the dump" from "download" to "read from file"
- In the next box, click on the "..." icon. Select C:\xowa\wiki\dungeons.wikia.com\dungeons_pages_current.xml
- Click "Import now"
- Wait for the import to complete
Other notes
- Broken wikis: Some wikis are missing pages. As of 2013-12-15, the Marvel and Yu-Gi-Oh dumps are know to be broken. You may have to contact Wikia.com to request that they investigate.
- Note that broken wikis will show a lot of pages with "{{:Page_name}}". This indicates that "Page_name" is missing from the dump. For example, the Marvel dump will show {{:The_Wolverine}} because it is missing Template:The_Wolverine
- Missing extensions: Wikia.com uses many custom extensions that are different from Wikimedia's extensions. For example, the #var and #ask extensions are specific to wikia.com only. XOWA renders these as "{{:#extension}}" or "<extension>"
- XOWA will try to implement these custom extensions in the future, but due to time constraints, they will be prioritized after Wikimedia extensions.
- If you have an extension that you would like to see supported, please contact me through Help/Feedback and let me know the wiki and the extension. Depending on number of requests and difficulty of implementation, I will try to include support for it.
- Missing images: XOWA currently can not show images for wikia wikis. It may include offline support for images in a future release, but downloading the image will be up to the user (i.e.: XOWA will not provide image database dumps for wikia wikis).
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Stylesheets: Wikia.com uses custom style sheets per wiki. By default, XOWA uses stylesheets for Wikimedia wikis. If you are adventurous, you can try to implement your own wikia.com stylesheet. Changes would need to be made in the following locations:
- css files: C:\xowa\user\anonymous\wiki\dungeons.wikia.com\html\xowa_commons.css and xowa_wiki.css . See Dev/Design/CSS for more info.
-
html layout: C:\xowa\xowa.gfs. Refer to the lines after
page_read =
- You can refer to this thread for instructions on creating an inverted-colors css for Wikimedia wikis
- If you create a css that matches the wikia.com one and would like it to be part of XOWA's release, please contact me via Help/Feedback