Help:WordToWiki

This help page is a how-to guide.

It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

There are various methods to transfer content from word processor software into a MediaWiki format as used on Wikipedia.

Google Docs

VisualEditor

VisualEditor allows for the copying/pasting of content from Word documents directly into a wiki page. Most formatting is kept intact – including tables. However, images and advanced formatting may need to be cleaned up upon import. This can also be used to acquire formatting for other programs that require plaintext (simply don't save the conversion and instead copy it from the editor and paste it wherever desired; a Sandbox is recommended for this).

Microsoft Word

VisualEditor

VisualEditor allows for the copying/pasting of content from Word documents directly into a wiki page. Most formatting is kept intact – including tables. However, images and advanced formatting may need to be cleaned up upon import. This can also be used to acquire formatting for other programs that require plaintext (simply don't save the conversion and instead copy it from the editor and paste it wherever desired; a Sandbox is recommended for this).

Extracting Images

You can extract contents of a docx word file by simply naming it a zip file (docx is a compressed archive). Once you have a zip file, you can open the archive and have a complete folder of the original images used in the document. See this short YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdhSJJqdK6s

Word2MediaWikiPlus

The following Visual Basic macros from 2007, unmaintained as of 2017, may still work: Word2MediaWikiPlus Tested with Office 365 word, conversion works despite getting a warning several times. NOTE: This will (apparently?) only work with 32-bit Office installations

Note that the web page where the source file for his can be downloaded as at 20240807 states "This extension has been archived. This extension has not been maintained for some time, and no longer supports recent releases of MediaWiki."

Download from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/word2mediawikip/

Microsoft Office Word Add-in For MediaWiki

Microsoft released an add-in that allows you to save your Microsoft Office Word 2007 or above documents straight into MediaWiki.

Download the "Microsoft Office Word Add-in For MediaWiki" from Microsoft Download Center, and install it.
Save the document as "MediaWiki (*.txt)" file type.
Copy the text from the (*.txt) file into your Wiki page

Note that this extension does not work for Word 2013 by default, however it can be made to work with a registry change. See this page.

Possible issues with alternative solution

This add-in requires Windows as an operating system; it won't work with macOS
This Microsoft add-in does not handle images. A placeholder is emitted.
End notes and footnotes can't be converted. Including them in a document will throw an error.
If you attempt to resolve the previous issue by inserting <ref> tags, upon conversion Word will replace the angled brackets with < and >
Some text will be enclosed by <nowiki> and </nowiki> tags.
Not supported for Office/Word 2013, see Word Add-in For MediaWiki not supported in Word 2013?

Nevertheless, for those who are unfamiliar with MediaWiki Markup Language and who are working on simple articles, the Microsoft Office Word Add-in For MediaWiki can be a useful tool.

Two-stage conversion from Word to MediaWiki

The following methods both perform: Word → HTML → MediaWiki.

Quick

Open your document in Word, and "save as" an HTML file.
Open the HTML file in a text editor and copy the HTML source code to the clipboard.
Paste the HTML source into the large text box labeled "HTML markup:" on the html to wiki page.
Click the blue Convert button at the bottom of the page.
Select the text in the "Wiki markup:" text box and copy it to the clipboard.
Paste the text to a Wikipedia article.

Automated scripts

The conversion can also be done using a combination of two scripts and two software packages.

The following two software packages must be installed:
- wvHtml Word to HTML converter – part of the "wvWare" word viewing library. (Note: wvHtml is deprecated and the site recommends using AbiWord --to=html instead. AbiWord can be obtained at abisource.com.)
- HTML::WikiConverter – a Perl module to convert HTML to wiki markup language.
Write the bash script "doc2mw", and the perl script "html2mw", both shown below.
Call doc2mw passing the word document as parameter. i.e.

> doc2mw my_word.doc

doc2mw: a bash script taking a single parameter, which calls wvHtml followed by html2mw.

 #!/bin/bash
 #       doc2mw - Word to MediaWiki converter
 
 FILE=$1
 TMP="$$-${FILE}"
 
 if [ -x "./html2mw" ]; then
         HTML2MW='./html2mw'
 else
         HTML2MW='html2mw'
 fi
 
 wvHtml --targetdir=/tmp "${FILE}" "${TMP}" 
 # but see also AbiWord: http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/howto/howtoexporthtml.html
 
 # Remove extra divs
 perl -pi -e "s/\<div[^\>]+.\>//gi;" "/tmp/${TMP}"
 
 ${HTML2MW} "/tmp/${TMP}"
 rm "/tmp/${TMP}"

html2mw: a perl script called by doc2mw, which uses HTML::WikiConverter to convert html -> mediawiki.

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 #       html2mw - HTML to MediaWiki converter
 
 use HTML::WikiConverter;
 
 my $b;
 while (<>) { $b .= $_; }
 
 my $w = new HTML::WikiConverter( dialect => 'MediaWiki' );
 
 my $p = $w->html2wiki($b);
 
 # Substitutions to get rid of nasty things we don't need
 $p =~ s/<br \/>//g;
 $p =~ s/\&nbsp\;//g;
 print $p;

Disclaimer: These scripts are probably not the best way to do this, only a possible way to do this. Please feel free to improve them.

OpenOffice or LibreOffice

LibreOffice Writer can save Word documents directly to wikitext: go to File → Export → Save as type: Mediawiki. (For Linux users it may be necessary to install the library libreoffice-wiki-publisher). Alternatively, use the command-line utility like this:

soffice --headless --convert-to txt:MediaWiki mydocument.doc

OpenOffice versions 3.3 and later can send documents in formats it supports (including Microsoft Word) directly to a MediaWiki, but this does not seem to work under Windows 7. (At least for the German version of OpenOffice 3.3.0 you need to install the ‘Sun Wiki Publisher’-extension first! Server url: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/ ) Once you have added the MediaWiki-server of your choice, future submissions can happen automatically.

Open the document in OpenOffice or LibreOffice Writer.
Go to File → Send-To → To MediaWiki or File → Export → Save file as: Mediawiki
Select your MediaWiki-server (or click on the button "Add..." to add a new site).
Select a title and summary for your article, check the box if it's a minor revision.
Click the send button.

Alternatively the manual 'export-function' can be used: File → Export → choose ‘MediaWiki (.txt)’-format. LibreOffice Writer 5 can export as a MediaWiki .txt file under Windows 10 if the appropriate 32- or 64-bit Java Runtime Environment (JRE) has been installed and enabled in LO. The document to be converted has to use styles, etc.; for example headers must be in Heading 2 style to be bracketed by "==" when converted.

Pandoc

Pandoc is a command-line utility that can convert from and to many document formats. Once installed, converting from Word to Mediawiki looks like this:

$ pandoc -t mediawiki mydocument.docx > mydocument.wiki

See also the online Pandoc tool which can convert an HTML-export of the Word document to MediaWiki format.