How to convert a Word doc or HTML to Wiki Markup April 5, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : mediawiki, tools, Wiki , 4comments
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:
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.
How to make image links in MediaWiki January 21, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Enterprise 2.0, mediawiki , 12commentsMediawiki Images
Mediawiki handles uploaded images on pages in a way which is perfectly suitable for a free encyclopaedia. If you click on an image you get taken to special page which tells you more about the image itself. Who uploaded it, where it came from, any revision history and which other pages link to it. But what if you want to use an image just as a graphical link, such as a button or banner that takes you to the page which the image is about? That’s quite a reasonable requirement because it’s how the internet usually works, it’s what what visitors are more likely to expect. Sending them to a dead end meta page full of technical data might not be what you want to do. So this article will show you how to make image links work properly in mediawiki.
Upload a file
For my example I’m going to upload a new image file to UsefulWiki. The file is a logo button for the Better Reading Partners section of the wiki, which I want to feature on the Main Page. Not all installations of mediawiki have enabled the uploading of images, but this one does. You can tell because there’s a link in the left hand side Toolbar: “Upload File” The upload process is straightforward, but it’s worth copying the hint which appears there, as it’s harder to find again later.
To include the image in a page, use a link in the form [[Image:file.jpg]],
[[Image:file.png|alt text]] or [[Media:file.ogg]] for directly linking to the file
I tried something like that in the Sandbox with this result (screenshot):
The orange BRP logo is a bit too large so I can adjust the syntax to ask for it to be rendered only 70 pixels wide.
[[Image:Brp-logo.gif|thumb|Description|70px]]
That’s better, but you see how clicking on the button takes you here? when you might expect to go to the Better Reading Partners page. I’m going to fix that by getting rid of the syntax for direct image linking and using the syntax for building an external link instead, using the full URL of the target page:
[http://usefulwiki.com/page/Better_Reading_Partners description]
then replacing the description with the sytax for rendering an external image directly onto a page - which is just the full url of the hosted image. In this case I can find out the exact location of the image file by right-clicking ( ctrl-click on my Mac ) the image itself and choosing “Copy image location”. That’s then pasted in instead of “description” above to give
[http://usefulwiki.com/page/Better_Reading_Partners http://usefulwiki.com/w/images/thumb/a
/a6/Brp-logo.gif/70px-Brp-logo.gif]
( all on one line, just one space chracter between the two urls )
What’s happening here is that the image is being retrieved and then used just like anchor text for the link, like a hyperlinked description, except that it’s a picture. That works fine in the sandbox, but there’s one more thing I can tweak. The little blue arrow which denotes an external link needs to go, because it’s an internal page which I’m linking to.
I can get rid of it by wrapping the whole piece of code in a little bit of CSS:
<span class=”plainlinks”>…….</span>
so all I have to do is transfer the code over to the UsefulWiki Main Page.
Done. Any questions? Ok….
How else can this technique be applied?
You might use it with externally hosted graphics instead of uploading image files to the same mediawiki.
Problems you may encounter
If your mediawiki does not have direct rendering of image files enabled, it won’t work. So in LocalSettings.php, set $wgAllowExternalImages = true;
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wikihow : How to install wikihow mediawiki software November 13, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikihow software, mediawiki, Wiki , 12comments
I tried installing the wikihow version of mediawiki software because it’s admired, and I need to know how it does some things. The nice people at wikihow have included what claims to be a compete bundle of all the skin modifications and extensions used by wikihow software in one big compressed file called
wikihow-source-code.tar.gz
So I uploaded the above file, extracted all the contents and ran through the usual mediawiki ‘one click’ install procedure - creating the MySQL database and user manually, editing adminsettings.sample, running the install script from the browser and then moving localsettings.php up to the parent directory. It told me it had installed mediawiki software successfully, but at the next step throws out a fatal error message that Article.php is failing to call PatrolHelper.php
PatrolHelper.php appears to be missing.
I tried commenting out the broken call but that caused more errors from lines depending on class variables having been initialised by said missing subroutine.
Any suggestions for getting the wikihow software working?
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
