[Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word

[Daniel Barrett]

If you do allow Word uploads, your Word users will still be unhappy.

That's because re-editing those Word documents later is full of problems.  To edit a document, you have to first download it, then edit it, then re-upload it.  This is already annoying.  But it gets worse: if two people try downloading, editing, and uploading the same document, they will silently overwrite each other's documents.  That is destructive.

Even worse, people will keep copies of those Word documents on their hard drives for a while, then just edit them and upload, never checking if the version in the wiki was already updated.

It's just asking for trouble.  Use a real document management system, and integrate it with MediaWiki by writing extensions.

DanB

-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of McHale, Nina
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 12:07 PM
To: mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word

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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