Wikispaces was one of the major wiki hosts (claims to have over 1.5 million wikis and 10 million users) with a mix of free and paid plans, and a focus on K-12 education. The site closed down in 2018 (on July 31 for free wikis, at the end of the year for paid ones), leaving most of those users scrambling for a new host to migrate to. MediaWiki might be one of the better options, but there is little tooling and no documentation.

Migration tools

  • importWikispaces.php is a migration script in the form of a MediaWiki maintenance script; it can import pages with full history, users and images and files. Run it as the user running the Apache server on a machine with MediaWiki installed (typically the apache user, probably not the root user), copy the importWikispaces.php file to a MediaWiki installation's maintenance directory, and issue the following:
sudo -u apache php /path/to/importWikispaces.php --user <Wikispaces username> --password <Wikispaces password> --spacename <Wikispaces space name> --history --use-timestamp
Apparently in the current form only works with paid spaces and has a couple shortcomings - see discussion here.
  • The export functionality for Wikispaces supports MediaWiki as an output language. That results in a bunch of textfiles, plus images, plus discussions in some JSON format.
    • vermuz/wikimediawikiscripts is a Python script (written a couple years ago) to preprocess Wikispace export files so they can be mass-imported into MediaWiki. nanotube/wikispacestomediawiki (features) is a companion script that does markup conversion; unclear if it's better than getting the export in MediaWiki format in the first place.

For creating or finding a wiki, see Manual:Installing MediaWiki and Hosting services. For finding paid help, see Professional development and consulting.

Also, some wiki hosts claim to do the migration for you: CiviHosting (), MyWikis (), QualityBox

Feature matching

Wikimatrix comparison.

  • Features:
    • WYSIWYG editor -> Extension:VisualEditor
    • Picture and File Manager -> VisualEditor uploads?
    • Easy Linking -> VisualEditor / Extension:WikiEditor
    • Search -> built-in or Extension:CirrusSearch
    • Easy backup: -> ???
    • Discussion forums -> Extension:StructuredDiscussions?
    • Wikispam Protection -> Manual:Combating spam
    • Web Folders (WebDAV) -> ???
    • Math Formulas -> Extension:Math
    • Most other mentioned features are suported by MediaWiki out of the box.
  • Wikitext features:
    • basic text formatting, links, anchors, images, tables are supported by default MediaWiki (see Manual:Configuring file uploads).
    • Syntax highlighting → Extension:SyntaxHighlight
    • References → Extension:Cite (uses same syntax)
    • RSS feeds → Extension:RSS
    • Variables → Help:Magic words
    • Including the contents of another wiki page -> Help:Templates
    • Mathematics → Extension:Math
    • Widgets → Extension:Widgets
  • Collaborative learning features:
  • Discussions -> talk pages, Extension:CommentStreams
  • Statistics -> Extension:Google Analytics Integration or Extension:Piwik Integration?
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