Well, you are absolutely correct for many of the reasons people have already mentioned.
But, your users are still asking to upload Word files. For whatever reason they want to
use Word to edit their content and have multiple people read and edit it. Maybe they are
old fashioned. Maybe they are not willing to listen. Who knows, but as a provider of
services you should still try to meet their needs.
Get a CMS system installed and tell everyone that is where documents will be stored. They
can check them out and in to keep versions straight. Then remove uploading of Word and
other documents in your wiki. Tell everyone they must use the CMS if they want to have
their content in a Word document. Even put a link in your wiki to the CMS. Make it easy
for them to use the wiki for what wikis are good for and the CMS for document management.
And if they still want to upload documents into the wiki, tell them it's a security
issue unless you have a virus checker scanning the images directory of your wiki server.
-Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of McHale, Nina
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 12:07 PM
To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word
Hey, all,
Some of my colleagues are objecting to my desire to minimize uploading of Word documents
to our new intranet wiki. My main objection to it is that we ought to be entering
information into wiki pages so that we can take full advantage of document versioning,
talk pages, watching, etc.-y'know, the stuff that makes it a wiki...
I've been called "silly" and "arbitrary" regarding this. :)
I'm not outright forbidding posting Word documents; I'm just trying to get people
to use the wiki the way it's mean to be used. Am I being unreasonable? I even stated
that it's acceptable to load the final version of a 20-page report, or a form
that's meant to be printed out and filled out by hand-i.e., things in a final state
that do not need further editing.
Has anyone else encountered this resistance? I was most surprised that it came from
someone who uses/edits Wikipedia, which, as far as I can tell, does not support uploading
of Word docs.
Nina
Nina McHale, MA/MSLS
Assistant Professor, Web Librarian
Auraria Library
http://library.auraria.edu/~nmchale/
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