[Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word

[Chris Reigrut]

We've seen the same basic tendencies of our users to stick with what 
they know, which is Office documents.  Yes, we much prefer it if people 
use a real wiki page, especially for Word documents, but frankly, I 
don't get all that bent out of shape about it--I'll mention it to people 
if it comes up, but I don't go out of my way to find people uploading 
those documents and trying to "convert" them.  And it does make sense in 
some occasions:  as you've mentioned, forms, final documents, but 
certainly for spreadsheets, presentations, etc.  As someone else 
mentioned, keeping a Word document up-to-date is quite a pain, and I've 
found that people tend to migrate to wikitext after the first few 
iterations.  We actually have extended the search engine to 
automatically index the text in common types of attachments so that they 
are searchable.

Personally, I've found that the lower-key approach works better, but 
your mileage may vary.

mediawiki-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:06:48 -0600
> From: "McHale, Nina" <Nina.McHale at ucdenver.edu>
> Subject: [Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word
> To: "mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org"
> 	<mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<3354E9B491D9EA47A1DB89BF9837636367007771F5 at STEAMBOAT.ucdenver.pvt>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> 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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