[Mediawiki-l] Using Wiki for documentation

[Dave Sigafoos]

We are looking at using Mediawiki as the source of information for our
IT infrastructure.  Since Wikipedia is a giant knowledge base, why not
our IT docs?

Here are a couple of questions that we have.

1) There are many existing docs, some of which we would like to move
into MW.  We can save a word document to *.html (using this we get a
warning from word that it might not be able to use the format :) but we
get a lot of extra bits.  It appears that the style classes it creates
at the beginning are not usable in the wiki document.

Is there a way to include these?  Do I have to create another skin?  Or
is there a better way to bring these documents over?

2) As we move forward we are looking to create a 'template' for the
various types of documents we have including Project Scope, Project
Technical Design and Project Functional Design.

I have been looking at the docs and 'templates' and wonder if I have
missed something.  Is there an easy way to create a 'template' (a
complete page with all tables, headings etc create) and then when you
want a new page simply bring that document in instead of the blank edit
panel

3) As we all know, change can be a very intimidating thing.  With this
in mind we are looking for ways to be able to edit, especially new
documents, with some form of WYSIWYG type editor.  Is there any that
have been used successfully with MW?  Any stories that you would like to
share on how you use these

4) One of our documents is really a large spreadsheet.  This works well
for the data analysis.  But I am wondering how MW will handle a large
table.  This might be something better to store in a secondary page and
link from the 'Data Analysis' heading page

I hope these questions are not outside of the scope of this list.  If
you prefer I will be happy to take all questions, comments off line

Thank you very much


DSig
David Tod Sigafoos | SANMAR Corporation
PICK Guy
206-770-5585
davesigafoos at sanmar.com