[Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word

[Benjamin Horst]

Yes, I've experienced this many times. Maybe with every wiki I've set  
up...

People don't recognize that this short term convenience eliminates  
many of the advantages of a wiki in the first place, but after enough  
experience they will learn.

In the meantime, you are doing the right thing. You need to be firm to  
establish the precedent of best practices, especially with a new wiki.

You may have to convert some docs into wiki pages yourself, for now.  
Open the word doc in OpenOffice, and then Export it in MediaWiki text  
format. Then you can copy the text, which will be in the correct  
markup syntax, and paste it into the text field of the wiki's edit page.

You can go one better and find the OpenOffice extension that allows  
you to configure your wiki and then save pages directly into it from  
within OpenOffice, and perhaps teach this practice to your users over  
time...

Ben

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 28, 2009, at 12:06 PM, "McHale, Nina"  
<Nina.McHale at ucdenver.edu> wrote:

> 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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