BTW there is a bug report regarding this general issue: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2089 "Whitelist OASIS OpenDocument file format"
2009/5/6 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
There's still the problem that most ODF uploads would be much more suitable as wiki pages. That makes them a lot easier to edit.
Or maybe: it would be nice to have a MediaWiki extension that made collaboratively editing slide sets as simple as collaboratively editing wiki pages.
Your
presentation could be uploaded as a bunch of images that you'd put on the wiki page. Then each image could be edited separately, etc. The same goes double for documents that are mainly text. You have to download and reupload to edit, you need to install some special software to do the editing, there are no automatic diffs, . . .
I believe it would not be hugely difficult to make an extension to incorporate the S5 slide show format which is based on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. DokuWiki has a plugin for this and it's very neat. I wrote about this idea a few months ago. http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/185/wikiversity-interested-how-to-make-a-wiki-editable-slideshow
However, the most popular method of developing slides by far, is by Powerpoint/Keynote/OO.org Impress etc. I don't think there has been developed any good method for converting these kinds of slide sets to the S5 format or a similar format. So while it may be true that "they should just be wiki pages", in reality that doesn't really work. In the absence of good format conversion methods, it makes more sense to aim for collaborative editing of the existing popular style of creating slides.
And in the absence of THAT, it would be nice if we could at least upload ODFs so we can download them and edit them manually (a la SVGs). Being stuck with PDFs only is the worst of all situations.
Even if slide sets are not used much directly by the projects (or is it just not YET because there is no good method for sharing them?), they are still extremely useful to share in the "meta-organisation" and for promoting the projects. And to my mind that kind of material is also important to support.
cheers Brianna