I came across some more tips for converting Word documents so that the content can be added to a wiki. That’s something which a corporate Knowledge Management pogramme is likely to require, and can be handy for individuals from time to time as well. The challenge is to avoid temptation to open up the wiki for raw HTML input and then putting the really bloated and non standard html code which Word produces itself into the wiki, because then nobody is ever going to really want to wade through all that rubbish in order to edit the content. That’s similar to the problem where one person likes to use one of the attempts at a WYSIWYG wiki editor for mediawiki to create pages, and then another person tries to develop the page further using the plain wiki text editor – it’s messy.
So any tool which generates nice plain simple wiki text from other inputs is going to be great for migrating content from out of email attachments and intranet databases and out onto the flat hierarchy of the open wiki space.
I generally use this one for converting from HTML pages into mediawiki syntax:
HTML::WikiConverter
and the tip below for converting to html through gMail is a good one too. Did you know you can use that technique to convert pdf’s into editable text as well?
Convert Word doc or Webpage to wiki – A Consuming Experience
For me, the two ways which worked the best were:
- Convert Word to HTML via Gmail, then convert the Webpage’s HTML to wikitext with Emiliano Bruni’s excellent HTML2Wiki Converter (where you paste the raw HTML code into the top box, and the wiki code appears in the bottom box which you can copy and paste into your wiki). Or (less good in its conversions, I found) -
- Convert Word to wiki direct using a Word macro – Word2MediaWikiPlus worked OK, though nowhere near as well as the above, for a MediaWiki wiki and PBWiki wiki that I tried them on (and those are probably two of the more popular wiki software platforms around); the results needed quite a lot of tidying.
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
That sounds pretty impressive. I’m just starting to look at setting up wiki’s so have bookmarked this page. Do you mind if I like to it at a later date if I do a tutorial?
Also how to you rate openwiki?
Hi Phil, yes links in are always welcome, especially if you make it a video tutorial perhaps?
Openwiki looks interesting as another possible platform, I’d give it a try but it seems to run on asp.net and I don’t have access to a Windows server right now. Anyway, the software for wikis isn’t so important really, it’s community norms that develop over time which set the course for future expansion or not, to a large extent, alongside other factors.
How would I link from a Video Tutorial?
How to link from a video tutorial hmm, all sorts of ways…
* by giving a mention in the video and audio itself
* by posting to YouTube , Flickr Video, etc with a hypertext link in the description.
* by enabling “blog this” and embed
* blog the video yourself and link from the post
and probably more ways I can’t think of right now