18 October 2006
Converting between wikis
WikiMatrix [ via Lifehacker's article "Set up your personal Wikipedia" ] is a nice site that lists around 50 wiki packages. It provides detailed fact sheets on all of them, along with a wizard that helps you choose between the different packages and ultimately compare their differences. Just comparing the differences in markup is useful to appreciate a lack of standards.
There really needs to be default utilities in every wiki that can export to and import from HTML. That would retain 90+% of the content and make wikis a reliable option for data storage. People complain about lock-in with Microsoft Office; this is exactly the same if somewhat more obscure. Basic support should consist of: internal and external links, categories (tags), and images. Wikipedia lists some simple tools for converting to a Wikipedia article from various formats including HTML, but none support complete site import. Another failing of a lack of standards. And there're also several tools for converting blocks of wiki text to HTML--one written in Ruby.
New project!
Some additional links:
- WikiAPI - The generic Java Wiki API - Java classes for managing wikis. Supports MediaWiki and TWiki.
- WikiConverter - Converts HTML to 13 wiki formats. Discussed in a thread on WikiMatrix where a like mind pointed out that
Using HTML as an intermediate format seems to me as the most sensible way to manually export/import content from one wiki to another.
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