Trouble importing from Wikipedia

I’ve tried importing articles several times from Wikipedia and a number of words end up being squashed together. I’ve also copied and pasted into Word and removed all formatting before then pasting into Link, but once the file is saved it still runs a lot of words together - making me have to edit the whole document and reinsert spaces where they are needed. Any idea what’s going on or how to avoid this? Obviously it makes importing not worth the hassle if everything has to be redone, but I’ve never had this problem before.

Would you be able to direct me to an article where this happens consistently for you? Thanks!

Sure. I’ve been trying to import and/or copy/paste the article on France from wiki site: France — Wikipédia. And the history of france Histoire de France — Wikipédia. Also, on Victor Hugo. It seems to have trouble with running together words that are hyperlinked. Feel free to see on my account. Notice the “blue” words and how many are two or three words run together. There are several imports there with titles pertaining to france history - should be easy to see. Thanks:)

Try to put the words first into the simple “Editor”, not into “Word”. The text will loose the formatting. Then copy the text from the Editor into LingQ. I guess, this will work.

I tried importing these and don’t seem to be having the same problem: Login - LingQ

I do see that the lessons in your account have incorrect formatting, so I wonder whether it’s an issue with the browser and/or OS that you have. Would you be able to tell me which browser you’re using (the version number as well) along with which OS you have?

I had this problem too with Firefox and Windows XP.

@VeraI - I just tried on Windows XP using Firefox and it seems to work properly. Can you try again and see if you can reproduce this?

Yes, I can reproduce it. I’ve tested the first two paragraphs of this article: Mittelalter – Wikipedia

It doesn’t matter if I import it from Wikipedia or via Word.

If I copy the text to the Editor and add it than it works.

I’ve reported this problem some months ago.

Here’s what I get when trying this: http://screencast.com/t/lDw9gCnWo

I don’t speak German, so it would be great if you could verify the result.

My OS is Windows 7 and browser IE 9.0.7. However, I just tried Veral’s idea on copy to a simple editor first and then into Link and it worked! So thank you so much! And Alex, thanks for importing that whole article.

Try also the printer version of the page - select from the left menu

Try also the printer version of the page - select from the left menu

Alex, if you do it with the Bookmarklet everything works fine. But if you use copy+paste and the import page of LingQ it doesn’t work.

Just another idea related to this topic – I use the Import Bookmarklet to import mathematical articles from Wikipedia. However, in such articles, equations and mathematical symbols are usually included as images. Since this bookmarklet doesn’t import images, the articles become hard to read (I have to switch constantly between the original and the imported article). Would it be possible not to strip the tags? The images would load from Wikipedia anyway, so it wouldn’t require any further data to be transferred to and from lingq.com.

@VeraI - Ok, this should be working properly in the next update.

@JakubMarian - In order for the Import bookmarklet to work properly, we actually have to strip the HTML code. The additional HTML code on the lesson page also causes problems with the LingQing functionality so we have to exclude images from lesson texts.