Microsoft KB Archive

From BetaArchive Wiki

This is a new part of the wiki - an archive of all Microsoft KB articles. And perhaps the only archive where you can help make it better and more complete!

For now, place them as a subpage of this page - so for KB article KB1234567, it should be at Microsoft_KB_Archive/1234567, or 1234567. For a real example, see 216417. Do NOT include the KB in the link.

Guidelines

  • Maintain the Microsoft KB structure as much as possible. See 216417 for an example. Headings should be in H2 form (that is, == title == ).
  • Do not blindly copy-paste to the wiki - make sure that the formatting is correct.
  • Standard wiki rules with attribution apply - which means that you must attribute the source if you got it from, say, web.archive. Include the link in "Sources".
  • It is fine to add links to other parts of the wiki (for example one to Windows 2000 as can be seen in the sample article).

A guide to mass-adding files

Multiple unnecessary restrictions by the admins make this harder than it should be

This is a short guide on how to import KB articles located in MSDN help files into this wiki.

  1. Look for the .htm file that contains the KB files you want.
  2. Use 7zip to extract all the files inside it into a directory of your choice.
  3. Navigate to one of the directories. You should see full of files of the form Q[number].htm.
  4. Use the pandoc program to convert all the files inside it into MediaWiki. Use a different file extension, and convert it into a different folder. For example, if you want to convert them into a folder convert, use the command (on Linux/WSL) for f in *.htm; do pandoc "$f" -f html -t mediawiki -s -o "convert/${f%}.txt"; done.
  5. Strip off the Q in each file - use the command rename 's/.{1}(.*)/$1/' * to do it.
  6. On a local installation of MediaWiki, use the command sudo php /var/www/html/mw/maintenance/importTextFiles.php -u X010 -s "stage1" --prefix "Microsoft KB Archive/" *.htm, where X010 should be replaced by your username to import all the files into that installation. For small batches, Special:Import could work as well.
  7. Export it: use the command sudo php dumpBackup.php --current --output gzip:out to export everything in the wiki as a gzip. Make sure to decompress it, and remove any unwanted pages in the output.
  8. Use Special:Import to import everything into the wiki.

Special notes:

  • The import times out: you'll need to split it. Testing with this wiki shows that about 350 pages can be imported at a time without any issues (in that case, instead of using dumpBackup.php, use Special:AllPages, copy into Notepad, and then copy its output into Special:Export.
  • Alternatively, install the Html2Wiki extension. While it's very powerful in that one can simply zip all the files and then use the extension to upload all at once, you'll also need to drastically increate the timeout limits. In local settings, about 500 pages could be imported at a time this way (hence one can split into N/500 zip files).
  • Currently, only moderators and higher can import pages. Should you require this, please contact X010 or Andy or mrpijey, and we may grant the import permission to you. The same applies if the size is too large, in which case we'll import it directly on your behalf.
  • For later KB files, there will be links which Pandoc will convert to the form [[qnumber.htm|number]]. To convert this to the form [[number|number]], we need to apply a pair of sed commands: sed -i -- 's/.htm|/|/g' * and sed -i -r 's/\[\[q/\[\[..\//g' *. It's also possible to do this post-conversion, but that will be costlier and potentially lead to timeout issues.

List of KB articles

Obviously under construction. You may want to use the search box to search for your desired KB article.

See List of KB articles to see the full list in one page. Warning - it's big!