Sometimes you need to export pages from one Fandom community to another. Or you may want to grab some pages from a non-Fandom wiki, like Wikipedia. You can do this by using the Special:Export page on the donor wiki — and the Special:Import page on your wiki.

Anyone can use Special:Export. It simply creates XML file of the pages you choose. But you have to be an admin to use Special:Import, the page which unpacks an XML file into pages on your wiki.

Before exporting

Special:Export is the cleanest way of adding a series of one MediaWiki site's articles to another MediaWiki site. This is because when imported, licensing data, and attribution transfers over, keeping the content CC-BY-SA compliant.



That said, it is not always appropriate to export content from a site. The content should be exported so that the importing community can use the content in a new and unique way or in a different context. For example, you might import Marvel's page about Thor into a community about the movie Thor. Or you might import a series of pages from an English community into an international community so that they can be translated more easily.

As a rule of thumb, keep in mind that others have created the pages you are exporting. Simply importing their work for no other reason than to have their work is something you would likely not appreciate if they did the same to you.


How to deal with a "collision"
When importing content you may come across pages at two different communities that have the same name. In this case, one of the pages is going to have to be renamed before doing the import. You can't do it afterwards. If you forget to do this, the edit histories of both articles will get fused, and you'll typically end up with a page history that's simply too confusing to be understood.
Generate a list of articles
If that isn't possible, you can copy and paste lists of article titles from a Category page, Special:Allpages, a DPL list, or any other source of page titles. You might need to work with the pasted list in your favorite external notepad, word processing or spreadsheet program to get a list of plain page titles with one title per line.
Choose whether or not to include page histories.
Including page histories is almost always the best choice, as it makes the required Creative Commons attribution for authorship much simpler. Unless you have a specific reason to want only the latest version, uncheck "Include only the current revision, not the full history".
You may need to leave "only current revision" checked for articles that have very long histories. If you do, please mention the source in the Special:Import comment field so that anyone investigating the page history of an imported article can see where it came from.
Choose whether or not to include templates.
Some wikis, including Wikipedia, tend to use lots of intricate and flexible templates and sub-templates, developed over many years by people who specialize in their construction. They're often a lot more complicated than you need at Fandom. Be prepared to either import a lot of templates and sub-templates to make imported Wikipedia pages display properly, or to edit the pages after import to remove or simplify the template code.
Save the exported file.
Check "Save as file" to save the export to your computer as an XML file. If the reported file size is larger than about 1.8 MB, you will need to reduce the size of your Export list and try again, so that you can import the desired pages in smaller chunks.
Import the file to the new community.
Go to Special:Import on the destination community and click the "browse" button to find the XML file on your computer. The imported pages will be listed on Recent changes and on Special:Log/import. You can only do this if you are an admin on the wiki you are importing to.
Provide credit, as required by our license
New wikis are automatically provided with {{Wikipedia}}, meaning that you can add {{Wikipedia}} to the bottom of your imported page to provide the required attribution for anything copied from Wikipedia.
You can also create copies of this template to use for other sources. For example, if your specialized cooking community borrows a set of recipe and ingredient pages from Recipes Wiki, then you could create a similar "Template:Recipes Wiki" to provide links back to that community.
Make changes for your community

See also

Further Help and Feedback
