Wikispooks:Importing From Wikipedia

Wikispooks would not be where it is today without Wikipedia. For one thing, it would lack the software which runs it. Wikipedia articles are sometimes a good starting point for Wikispooks articles, although care needs to be taken, and potential problems carefully borne in mind.

Problems

Full article: WikiSpooks:Problems with Wikipedia

Wikipedia is not a neutral forum for the critical evaluation of evidence. Large organisations spend a lot of time and effort to spin its content for their own purposes. Wikipedia's trust in the commercially-controlled media is particularly problematic for deep political content, often resulting in articles so full of irrelevant or misleading details that they are worse than useless. Importing articles, particularly large ones, is problematic since this taints Wikispooks with the opinions and biases which are often subtly encoded therein. As an absolute minimum, do not import material into Wikispooks you have not read carefully and judged to be suitable.

Editing as you import

Much preferred to importing whole articles from Wikipedia is to selectively edit content as you do so. Wikipedia is generally accurate and well referenced for basic, indisputable facts and most of its articles are well structured. However, a significant amount of Wikipedia's content is not of much relevance, so articles may need drastic pruning to keep the focus firmly on the core mission of exposing deep politics. Serious researchers into a topic will probably have already read the current Wikipedia article, so obscuring original content with an outdated version of a Wikipedia article gains nothing. So, Wikipedia articles can be a good starting point provided you are selective and can handle Wikipedia's bias.

Handling Wikipedia's Bias

Wikipedia increasingly treats the official narrative as unvarnished truth, sometimes filling most of the article with it, while relegating dissent to a small subsection near the bottom or sometimes completely censoring it. Wikispooks by contrast, condenses details of the "Official narrative" to a short introductory section at the top, allowing more room for ideas which Wikipedia flags as "contraversial" (by which it means 'anti-establishment'). Wikipedia's "Criticism", "Alternative Theories" or "Conspiracy Theories" sections are often the most relevant to Wikispooks.

How To Import

All wikipedia/wikispooks articles consist of source text, so one might think that cutting and pasting source between the two would be sufficient to copy an article. In fact, it is not so simple if this source refers to other articles (e.g. Templates) which will also need to be copied across if they are not present.

Copy and Paste

To import short article sections, it is usually fine to simply "view source"/"edit" and then copy-and-paste this source text into a Wikispooks article. This will work correctly for simple formatting such as references and manually drawn tables. Images will not be copied, so you will need to upload images manually.

If the source includes templates which are not present on Wikispooks, you will see a red "template:..." which shows which templates are missing. You can copy these by hand, but these may also use templates themselves, so this may be more work than it appears. If you meet this problem, see below for a more efficient method of importing articles.

Special:Import

Where the cut-and-paste method fails due to use of templates, Wikipedia offers a more efficient and reliable alternative method, the Special:Export page. This makes a single XML file ouf of the article text and (if you check the 'Include templates' checkbox) also all the templates which it needs to display correctly. This file can be imported into Wikispooks via Special:Import, to recreate not only that one page, but also all the templates on which it depends to render correctly. Note that you will still have to import images manually. Note that most editors do not have permission to use this, so you may need to ask an administrator to do it for you. Robin has volunteered to help you with this on request.