Moving a wiki to Miraheze

Moving a wiki hosted by yourself, Wikia, or any other MediaWiki host is possible. You just need an 'XML' file with the history of your wiki.

Exporting from Wikia
Wikia provides XML dump of wikis in. It may be outdated - have your wiki administrators click "Send request" button there. If your wiki has no active administrators, you'll have to contact Wikia support to click it for you. See Wikia's own documentation for this. Please notify the system administrators of your wiki's statistics page. System Administrators: You MUST download "Current pages and history" because of legal reason. (Attribution requirements of Creative Commons)

Exporting from Special:Export
You can export your wiki using Special:Export. That page is self-explanatory, just make sure to uncheck "" because of the legal concerns outlined above. If this fails, you'll have to use the method below.

Exporting via maintenance scripts
If you have access to the server where MediaWiki is installed, issue dumpBackup.php in the wiki.

Caveats

 * This method does not export image files. You will have to copy the files and give them System administrators for processing.
 * Alternatively, you can use Wikiteam's wiki archiving tool to make a XML dump and download all available images at the same time. We can't guarantee it will work on all wikis, nor we will run it for you. You'll have to run it on your own and prepare the data.
 * These tools cannot populate the user database. Even if you have a database dump with the user data to import, we cannot handle their user information unless you have the users' consent to transfer the user data to us.

Do it yourself
If your dump is really small (less than few KBs), you can try Special:Import on your wiki. (Don't try this command in Meta! Well... you can't do it, unless you have local sysop. Still, don't do it, unless you have compelling reason.) Images cannot be uploaded with the MediaWiki interface. Please see below secion.

Request import
If your file is big enough that MediaWiki fails to process in due time, it has to be processed by Miraheze system administrators. Please request import using this form (Phabricator account required), and send your actual XML dump to staff@undefinedmiraheze.org. Image import should also follow this way, too.

Please note that we will disable any editing on the wiki during the import process: Your wiki users will need to create an account on Meta (this wiki!) and use that username and password to log in on the wiki after the import is complete. Also, please do not edit your wiki until your import is complete.