User:Raidarr/Don't import Wikipedia

Don't import Wikipedia! Alt title, don't turn your wiki into a black box

Why not?

Wikipedia is a massive website built on years of fine tuned development. Its templates & modules have been developed by an army of, frankly, nerds who have it down pat and since it's one massive wiki, hundreds of calls to modules and templates are not really a problem. It is advanced and the way it's meant to be.

Your wiki is almost certainly the opposite. It's one man show as they say, and you almost certainly don't need the intricacies of full Wikipedia templates. By importing off the tap from enwiki (where the largest issues come from), you will not be able to settle with just 'what you need' and going from there. You will have errors and dependencies. You will need to import many pages to satisfy the big ugly errors, likely becoming frustrated with the import system due to how much would be required to do it properly. This will clutter your wiki. You will likely have no idea how any of it really works but it will be on your wiki and unless you wipe and reset the wiki or deploy a very careful nuke via the extension, you can't get rid of it. Not conveniently. It's far easier to bring all this stuff in than to say you don't need it later.

You will have tricky situations come up even after doing it successfully, but likely during all of this because the process isn't trivial. It's likely you will then (if you haven't already) appear on Discord seeking answers to the issues, where we who have seen this happen will ask in despair, "did you import wikipedia..."

So what can I do instead?

Refer to the Infoboxes guide which offers alternatives for infoboxes in detail. The leading option in short is to use the PortableInfoboxes extension, an adaptation of how Fandom does its infoboxes which is popular among many communities (and can be themed to look like wikipedia infoboxes too!). Alternatively or in case you want something other than infoboxes, consult mh:dev:Dev Wiki. Dev wiki offers ready-to-import resources with few to no dependencies, easier to understand and performant.

There are always exceptions

If you genuinely *do* understand what's going on with the modules and templates of Wikipedia and are committed to match wikipedia's environment, that's entirely up to you. If you encounter people discouraging you even after making this informed decision, refer them to this section. There are a handful of volunteers (harder to come by but around) who can help wrangle this business manually even though it is often discouraged for the reasons above.

This reference is written for new or less experienced wiki operators; you may wish to explore lua templates and more advanced creation on your own for learning, passion or specific needs. For support on these cases you can consult some of our wizards on the Community Noticeboard or through Discord, but realize that you will be one of the very few and with little effort you'll likely be a trailblazer yourself. We welcome your insights and contributions, especially if you come up with solutions not referenced to these sorts of problems! Even notes on the talk page about your experiences would be helpful, or you can edit them into the essay as appropriate. Feel free to contribute to the Infoboxes guide as well; it is a critical resource and is always a work in progress.

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This is an essay from raidarr who welcomes any questions, critiques & alternate views, suggestions and further comments via talk page; any corrections can freely be made.