I just realized that your users who refuse to use the wiki and want to use Word are
probably doing so because of the wikitext editor, which can be a real pain for people to
switch to from Word. Over a year ago we installed the FCKeditor extension
(FCKeditor+Mediawiki) which provides a WYSIWYG editor to Mediawiki. It had its bugs then
but has improved a lot and I have heard no complaints from our many users. With a WYSIWYG
editor you will likely have a much better response from users who switch to the wiki from
Word.
-Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chris Reigrut
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 11:53 PM
To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word
We've seen the same basic tendencies of our users to stick with what
they know, which is Office documents. Yes, we much prefer it if people
use a real wiki page, especially for Word documents, but frankly, I
don't get all that bent out of shape about it--I'll mention it to people
if it comes up, but I don't go out of my way to find people uploading
those documents and trying to "convert" them. And it does make sense in
some occasions: as you've mentioned, forms, final documents, but
certainly for spreadsheets, presentations, etc. As someone else
mentioned, keeping a Word document up-to-date is quite a pain, and I've
found that people tend to migrate to wikitext after the first few
iterations. We actually have extended the search engine to
automatically index the text in common types of attachments so that they
are searchable.
Personally, I've found that the lower-key approach works better, but
your mileage may vary.
mediawiki-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:06:48 -0600
From: "McHale, Nina" <Nina.McHale(a)ucdenver.edu>
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word
To: "mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org"
<mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<3354E9B491D9EA47A1DB89BF9837636367007771F5(a)STEAMBOAT.ucdenver.pvt>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
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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