Migration From TWiki

Definition Lists

In the converted from TWiki documents, the following idiom shows up a lot:

* <b>Item</b><br>
   Words, words, words, so many words about a variety of things, like the definition
   or description of what the Item is. Because TWiki saved to regular text files,
   they were concatenated to ~80 characters, which introduces other weirdness in
   MediaWiki.

* <b>Another Item</b><br>
   Some more words.

The way to solve this in MediaWiki is to use a definition list, and also to concatenate the 80 character lines into one long line, like this:

; Item
: Words, words, words, so many words about a variety of things, like the definitionor description of what the Item is. Because TWiki saved to regular text files, they were concatenated to ~80 characters, which introduces other weirdness in MediaWiki.
; Aother Item
: Some more words.

This renders quite similarly to the old TWiki example, but is less cumbersome to type out, so that's nice.

Fix the lists-become-block-quotes problem

This one is just a symptom of the 80 character lines in the converted site. For paragraphs and such, there is no problem, but in lists and some other cases, MediaWiki displays the second line forward as a blockquote, breaking the list and causing display havoc. This is fixed simply by removing the excess line feeds. I use the "It's All Text!" plugin for Firefox to allow me to use vim to edit the pages, so I can use "<Shift-J>" to join the lines, and "j" to move to the next. It's very, very fast, and I can knock out a page in a few minutes. (So, this problem likely won't exist for long, as Eric and I are fixing them fast.)

Tables should be of class="wikitable" instead of border="1"

This one is easy. When you come across an ugly table with an old-fashioned border that looks like it was rendered in Netscape Navigator, just delete border="1" and replace it with class="wikitable". This will make the table into a nice, simple, grey table. But, it can be styled easily in the future during a redesign.

Asterisks for italics or bold

There are a number of instances where an asterisk is used to indicate italics. Somehow, it got botched in conversion and so the asterisk is offset by a space character and butted up against the next word. This should have been converted to two single quotes on each side of the word.

For example, it often appears something like this in the text:

This sentence has a '''Configuration directive''' which is followed by *The First Option *and The Second Option.

It should be converted to this:

This sentence has a '''Configuration directive''' which is followed by ''The First Option'' and ''The Second Option''.

In some cases, asterisks may be used for configuration directives, which should be bold rather than italics. In such cases, simply use three single-quote marks rather than two.

Note

In Joe's book, there was frequent use of "Note!" callout blocks (also "Warning" and "Info" callouts, but I haven't setup templates in MediaWiki for those yet). These were converted to the following idiom in TWik:

%ICON{note}%Note: Some text.

These can be converted to:

{{Note|Some text.}}

Renaming or moving or deleting pages

This wiki has been around in its previous form for many years, and has hundreds of backlinks from the web. When pages are moved, deleted, renamed, whatever (which is great; reorganization to make things nicer for users and editors is totally cool!), a redirect at the old location must be left behind to help users coming in from those old links.