Test Converting MediaWiki content to Markdown or reStructurtedText

[deoren]

Goals

• Convert raw MediaWiki formatted content into another open format that I can parse further with tooling to produce PDF, epub or other consumable formats

• Write up the experience in an easy to follow manner so that others can benefit from what I learn

References

• https://bitbucket.org/wikier/mw2md
• https://bitbucket.org/SamuelMarks/mw2md/commits/baa507702a1fc822dff4b9a8d4199bef435901ac
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4980904/is-there-any-way-to-convert-wikitext-to-markdown-in-python
• https://github.com/philipashlock/mediawiki-to-markdown
• https://github.com/outofcontrol/mediawiki-to-gfm

[deoren]

Well, unless I missed something, this was super easy.

1. lxc launch ubuntu:18.04 mediawiki-convert-test
2. lxc exec mediawiki-convert-test -- /bin/bash
3. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y pandoc git texlive-latex-recommended texlive-xetex
4. Visit https://wiki.whyaskwhy.org/index.php?title=Android&action=edit and copy raw content out (leaving out the leading categories entries, though this may have been fine to leave in)
5. Save as input.txt
6. pandoc -f mediawiki -t rst input.txt -o output.rst

Voila, reST format achieved.

[deoren]

Note: I used my notes from #3 to get started here with pandoc packages.