Thursday, January 18, 2007

Adventures in Wiki Land

A few days ago we set up a wiki at my workplace and I'll be responsible for populating the thing with our technical help documentation. I'm excited about the project and hope that it can give us better access to our materials.

The first hurdle comes with getting the existing documentation into the wiki. Some of it is in MS Word, but most of it is bound into a couple of help utilities that simply don't work well. The Word docs are easy to drop in and don't require much massaging (wiki formatting is not nearly as labor intensive as html) but the other stuff will probably need to be formatted more extensively to retain a uniform look. This will be no small task, and has had me scrambling for any helpful utilities I could find.

At present I'm experimenting with WordtoWiki, a Word macro that does much of the markup for you. It does a fair job, but the resulting documentation still requires so much cleanup (I'm picky) that I may simply start performing all the wiki markup by hand.

I also tried, and quickly abandoned, a similar macro called Word2MediaWikiPlus. It works, but I didn't care for all the "extra" html markup it generated. Wiki markup accepts a lot of plain ol' html markup as "valid," but it looks messy, and in the interest of future editabilty I wanted to keep the text as clean as possible.

The next step will be to start uploading images and graphics into the wiki, and figuring out how to get it all playing well with the text.

Now that sounds like fun, eh?

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