Converting to or from wiki markup is now impossible

For WMF employee / slave nonsense, developer hijinks, and MediaWiki and related software screw-ups.
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ericbarbour
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Converting to or from wiki markup is now impossible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Feb 10, 2019 12:04 am

I've got MacOS 10.11. And an HTML file I need to convert to wiki markup (MediaWiki) format.

LibreOffice most versions have a built-in converter extension to save a file as MediaWiki, with weblinks converted as needed. Unfortunately, all recent Mac versions of LibreOffice DO NOT HAVE THIS. There is no explanation why. And I have looked far and wide for an installable extension or a webpage that can do this rather simple thing. All the HTML-to-wiki converters I can find with searches are either dead links or don't work properly anymore.

It's incredibly frustrating. All I want to do is convert a web page to MediaWiki to add to the book wiki. Five years ago it was easy; now it's not possible unless I write my own code. There is some suspicion that WMF people are telling software developers to take their conversion tools down, but why would they do something that discourages the use of their platform?

Every online converter I've looked at -- Pandoc, Zamzar, Convertfiles, Filezigzag -- does not convert to MediaWiki format. Some used to, but the current versions do not handle any Wiki markup format.

ALL of the converters listed here are dead links, links to ancient source code, or not applicable. It's all outdated.
http://wiki.opensemanticframework.org/i ... converters

The "Textutil" terminal converter on MacOS will not do it. Could not find anything on the App Store that will do it. Doxillion Document Converter won't do it.

I wish I could put this down to simple paranoia or incompetence on my part but I can't. It WAS possible to do it and now it's impossible. Why?

Does this indicate that MediaWiki is dying out as a format, and therefore Wikipedia is dying?

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Dysklyver
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Re: Converting to or from wiki markup is now impossible

Post by Dysklyver » Sun Feb 10, 2019 1:01 am

A long time ago people thought wikitext would be a filetype, and included it in their products, even though wikitext was only used internally on Wikipedia (and still is only used internally on Wikipedia). It had a use case, and seemed good.

Because nobody had actually created a specification for the wikitext language, it immediately became unsupported as products were updated. It simply isn't possible to include an undefined codeset when making something, and the people who put it in there to begin with had moved on.

Nobody cares about reviving it, because every single use case for wikitext, including all non-mediawiki wikis, reddit, discord, github, jekyll, gitlab, discourse, etc all use markdown. Also markdown is just way better than wikitext.



btw.
Pasting stuff into the visual editor will convert it to wikitext.
Those old tools still work on linux and old systems.

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Re: Converting to or from wiki markup is now impossible

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Feb 10, 2019 11:24 pm

How complicated is this web page? For a one off job, it seems like it would be easier to just cut and paste the text, and manually write any table/image/formatting markeup.

For larger tables, there is always the options of using CSV as a halfway house....

http://convertcsv.com/csv-to-html.htm

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