Help:Downloading pages

This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcut H:DP

Downloading pages is saving a MediaWiki page as a local copy.

Saving a

shows the possibilities for saving a local copy of a webpage.

A set of linked pages

When saving a local copy of pages, please note the following.

A link to e.g. the train article in Wikipedia is given in the HTML-code as /wiki/Train . This refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train . Depending on your browser settings, the former may be changed into the latter when saving the page. To avoid this, apply View Source and save that.

Put the copy in folder C:\wiki (another drive letter is also possible, but wiki should not be a sub-folder) and do not use any file name extension. This way the links work. One inconvenient aspect is that you cannot open a file in a folder listing by clicking on it, because of the lack of a file name extension.

A problem with saving the source code is that images are not saved automatically with the page. Saving them separately in a place corresponding to the HTML code is cumbersome, e.g. the first image of the train article would have to be C:/upload/thumb/c/c2/250px-Tile_Hill_train_550.jpg

If the images are more important than the mutual links, then one can use the browser 'save page' option to save the webpage with images.

Of course variations are possible by changing the HTML-code oneself, e.g. changing http://en.wikipedia.org to C: and/or adding the file name extension .htm .

Alternatively one can copy the

, i.e. the text in the edit box (the source code within the database).

This has a limited use. There is more information in the webpage than conveyed by the wikitext:

• images
• content of templates referred to (to access a full wikitext, with all templates being expanded, use Special:ExpandTemplates; it has the effect of the recursively applied "subst:" operation).
• values of
  variables
• existence at the time of saving of linked internal pages
• date and time of the last edit before saving
• in the Image namespace (
  Image description pages
  ): the image itself, the image history and the list of pages linking to the image
• in the Category namespace: the lists of subcategories and pages in the category.

Information in the wikitext but not in the webpage:

• comments (even though HTML also allows comments)

See also XML export.

• Wikipedia:Database download
• Help:Export, for downloading to another MediaWiki site