[Mediawiki-l] wiki versus Word

[Katharina Wolkwitz]

I've got yet another suggestion concerning Word-documents. Don't let them be
uploaded into your wiki at all, but use a central shared folder(-structure) and
link to the documents from your wiki using the filelink-extension.

That's what we are doing and (afaik) it's working well. :-)
The shared folderstructure was already in existence and use when we decided to
use a wiki as a central starting point to all the different information in our
library with its four locations.

Some things are much better suited for putting into a word-document, requiring
extensive and in-depth formatting that is impossible or at least very difficult
to do inside a wiki-text.

Good luck!
Katharina

Chris Reigrut schrieb am 29.04.2009 05:52:
> 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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-- 

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Katharina Wolkwitz

Fachhochschule Südwestfalen
Hochschulbibliothek
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58095 Hagen
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