M204wiki:Database download

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Revision as of 19:43, 19 December 2012 by JAL (talk | contribs)
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Sirius Software offers free copies of the SirWiki wiki to anyone interested in the material. The copies are formatted in XML, appropriate for loading to your own installation of Mediawiki, or for use in any of the after-market products designed to present Wikipedia or Mediawiki content offline.

How to get a copy of SirWiki

To take a copy of SirWiki, point your browser — or other HTTP client application — at one of the following URLs:

http://wiki.sirius-software.com/images/sirWiki_full.xml http://wiki.sirius-software.com/images/sirWiki_current.xml

sirWiki_full.xml contains the full SirWiki content (minus user records, security groups and "talk" pages), including all past versions of each page. As of December 2012, this file is approximately 225 megabytes of data, and expected to constantly increase in size.

sirWiki_current.xml contains only the latest update of each Sirius Wiki page (minus users, security groups and "talk" pages). This copy provides the latest version of all material but without the page history. As of December 2012, this file is approximately 15 megabytes in size, and it is expected to increase in size but to always remain smaller than the "full" version. This is probably the copy you want.

Both of the above files are refreshed every night, at midnight EST, from SirWiki.

Updating SirWiki

If you make changes to your local copy of SirWiki and refresh from the source at Sirius, your local changes will be lost. The download Sirius provides is a full refresh, and no incremental option is currently offered.

If you'd like to contribute to SirWiki, please do it directly on SirWiki. You will need to obtain a user ID from Sirius, as described in the Sirius website.

What to do with your copy of SirWiki

Most likely you are taking a copy of SirWiki because your Model 204 site does not provide internet access from your site during work hours. Keeping a local copy of the Sirius Wiki provides the Sirius documentation in a format that can be kept as up-to-date as you like.

If you want to present the Sirius Wiki in its original format, you'll want to install a local copy of Mediawiki, the software behind SirWiki:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

There are a variety of methods for importing the SirWiki dump, all explained at the Mediawiki site:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Importing_XML_dumps

Once you have a copy of Mediawiki installed, the simplest way to load the SirWiki content in a single step is via the script in maintenance/importDump.php (documentation provided in "Using importDump.php, if you have shell access" at the above link). For example, issue a command like the following:

php \www\mediawiki\maintenance\importDump.php c:\users\dave\downloads\sirWiki_current.xml

The above command can be run in Windows, if the MoWeS portable reader was installed in the root directory containing \www and the current SirWiki was saved in the above downloads directory.

Alternately, you can forgo the local installation of Mediawiki and use one of the aftermarket readers designed to import and display the Mediawiki XML dump. The most popular one is Wikitaxi (Windows only; no Linux or OS/X version is provided):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#WikiTaxi

A number of other viewing options are explained at the above page.

Copyright

All material in SirWiki is copyright 2012 by Sirius Software, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The material is provided here as reference material for our clients, for users of Model 204, and for educational purposes in the technical community.

See also