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Help:How to import articles

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Eloquence (talk | contribs) at 04:27, 9 February 2003 (copyrights, bots). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

There is an article you have written and you would like to import it into Wikipedia? There are several ways to accomplish this.

The most obvious thing to do is to copy and paste content. Note, however, that most formatting will not be preserved. Also note that single linebreaks are ignored by Wikipedia, so if your source uses them, you will get very long linebreaks. If you know about regular expressions, you can use something like s/\n/<br>\n/gs to acomplish single linebreaks, or s/\n/\n\n/gs to replace them with full paragraphs.

If you want to properly import articles, you may consider using a conversion utility. David Wheeler has written such a program for converting HTML to Wikipedia, see the html2wikipedia homepage. If you do not manage to install and operate this program, just ask on this article's talk page, and someone may be able to help you getting your files imported. If your article is not in HTML, there are in most cases ways to convert it into that format.

If it is a very long article, and intended primarily for reference purposes, you can upload it as a file (link to it using the [[Media:Filename]] syntax. Since Wikipedia is not intended as an archive for source material, this should be used sparingly.

Copyrights

Please note that you cannot import articles which the author has not put in the public domain, under the GNU Free Documentation License or a compatible (i.e. weaker) license. Everything is copyrighted "by default" according to international law. Simple permission to "use" an article will not be enough, you have to make clear to the author that his work can be modified and distributed in accordance with the GNU FDL.

Importing many articles

If you want to import many articles, it is usually a good idea to ask first if the material is appropriate for Wikipedia, for example, on Wikipedia:Village pump. If there is a very high number of articles, you may also want to consider writing or using a bot (i.e. a script) to import them; see Wikipedia:Bots for guidelines. Over 30,000 articles have been imported from US Census data, so it can be done.

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