[Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/4/28 McHale, Nina <Nina.McHale at ucdenver.edu>:
> 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.

Don't make your practices fit the tool, choose your tool to fit what
you need. If people want a central repository for Word documents,
MediaWiki isn't the thing to use. There are plenty of CVSs, etc. that
can handle document versioning, watching, etc.

You need to come to a consensus on what you want out of your IT
systems and then choose a tool which achieves that.