[Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word

[Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C]]

Well, you are absolutely correct for many of the reasons people have already mentioned.  But, your users are still asking to upload Word files.  For whatever reason they want to use Word to edit their content and have multiple people read and edit it.  Maybe they are old fashioned.  Maybe they are not willing to listen.  Who knows, but as a provider of services you should still try to meet their needs.  

Get a CMS system installed and tell everyone that is where documents will be stored.  They can check them out and in to keep versions straight.  Then remove uploading of Word and other documents in your wiki.  Tell everyone they must use the CMS if they want to have their content in a Word document.  Even put a link in your wiki to the CMS.  Make it easy for them to use the wiki for what wikis are good for and the CMS for document management.  And if they still want to upload documents into the wiki, tell them it's a security issue unless you have a virus checker scanning the images directory of your wiki server.

-Jim

-----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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