Dave Sigafoos:
I had gathered that images weren't searchable which makes sense to me
(except for descriptive information) but I did not realize that a
document with 'text' would not be searchable.
Documents are simply stored as-is in the filesystem; so, an uploaded
Word doc ends up stored in c:\WebServer\mediawiki\images\f\f7\foo.doc.
In contrast, Wiki pages are stored as fields in the MySQL database.
Search doesn't work on uploaded documents, because:
1. the search uses the MySQL search facility, and so only works on stuff
which is in the DB
2. since an uploaded doc could be in any format, there's no way to
search it: eg. if a document compresses its content using some
proprietary scheme, there's no general way to look inside it.
Note that the problems go beyond search: features like "What links here"
only work for links from Wiki pages, etc.
I do see now that it seems to put all uploaded
'media' to IMAGE: which
I
am not sure I understand.
The Image: namespace stores the meta-data for all uploaded files; I
guess the "Image" name is based on history and how it's used in WP. But
for those of us using MW for corporate nets, "Image:" means any uploaded
file.
Believe me, I feel your pain... if you find a way to stop your users
using Word for a single sentence of plain text, let me know. ;-)
Ian