Data dumps/Import issues

Issues encountered after import

My images are not rendering properly or do not show up at all in the article. How do I fix it?

This assumes you are not using InstantCommons or a Foreign File Repo (requesting media from Commons or another external web site on the fly).

First off, run the rebuildImages.php maintenance script if you have externally copied images into the /images directory under your MediaWiki installation. This allows MediaWiki to place database entries for the images into the master database and resync them with articles. There are two methods of invoking this script:

Rebuild the entire image table for MediaWiki:

php maintenance/rebuildImages.php >& images.log &

Rebuild the missing images for the Image Table for MediaWiki:

php maintenance/rebuildImages.php --missing >& images.log &

Run the program in both modes after copying images into the /images directory to sync up the database.

Please note that if you have set $wgMimeDetectorCommand = "file -bi"; in your LocalSettings.php file, when this command encounters corrupted images it will report "very short file" errors and cause rebuildImages.php to halt execution. Please check your images.log file if you encounter this error and delete the file in question; then restart the rebuildImage.php script. The file -bi command does not have a silent mode and MediaWiki will halt on errors where it cannot determine the MIME type for a particular image file.

How do I get the system statistics to show up properly after I import the XML files?

Run the initSiteStats.php maintenance script after your import completes. This will clear out the stats and update them with correct information.

My wiki takes a long time to display articles. What can I do to get better performance?

See mw:Manual:Performance tuning.

I get these strange math tags all over the articles with text formatting strings where mathematical formulas should be. What have I done wrong?

Install texvc and set up directories for it to use.

MediaWiki uses the texvc program to render math expressions by dynamically creating png images for these scripts. Make certain you have downloaded the texvc packages or downloaded O-Caml to rebuild this program. The program is located in the /math directory off your main MediaWiki root directory. Also, make certain you have created a /tmp directory off the root and set the permissions to 777 (rwxrwxrwx) to allow the texvc program workspace to render the images from articles.

I have imported the XML dump and enabled all of the extensions, but I keep getting red link tags to links to other language versions and they don't show up correctly in the left sidebar. How do I fix this?

Set up the interwiki.cdb file. See information on the interwiki cache for that.

I imported the dumps from the English Wikipedia into my Spanish Language MediaWiki installation so I can use them to translate into Spanish, but now Recent Changes and other navigation links point to non-existent pages. What did I do wrong?

By default, most of the enwiki dumps from the English Wikipedia (this same statement also applies to just about any language specific XML dump provided) contain MediaWiki namespace entries which define such things as the navigation toolbar, site messages, and other MediaWiki specific configuration settings. These entries are included in the XML dumps by language to allow someone to import the XML dump for a target language and in essence totally replicate the Wikipedia site provided the XML dump is imported properly to a target MediaWiki installation.

Many of the MediaWiki namespace entries are very specific to the precise language used on a particular Wikipedia project, and can cause problems if the XML dump is imported into a MediaWiki installation configured to a target language different from the source language from which the XML dump originated.