MiddleWiki About - 2026 Site Move

Milesent Vibert purchased a Go Daddy site and installed MediaWiki in 2024, but stalled on going live for various reasons. In 2025 she took back up the crusade, enlisting the advice of Ginna Vettori (who runs the very excellent Cleftlands wiki)

Fall of 2025 the project kicked off with meetings. There were several attempts to export/import the existing Wiki database into the new install that all failed; there were just too many versions and upgrades between. It was suggested to install an earlier copy of the wiki and upgrade it multiple times, but this was deemed likely to encounter problems; if we needed to solve issues upgrading from version 1 to 2, then from 2 to 3, then 3 to 4, etc. Finally it was determined to go forward with manual importing and exporting of pages. MediaWiki does have an export/import feature and indeed, 100s of pages can be imported and exported at once. However, for quality control issues the team chose to move a few pages at a time and lock (protect) those pages on the old site once moved to prevent their being updated.

The old site admin, Grant Root, was able to give Milesent an export of the database and all of the image files. She was able to import the image files directly and that was done in 2025. (This did become a problem as some images were updated after that point and had to be manually updated on the new site.)

Milesent, Edward Brackenburye and Raeffaelle lastname did the bulk of page moving. Milesent originally hoped to be done with the site move by January of 2026, however as of February 16th, we are still below 5,000 pages (of 7,500) moved.