Well summarized. Good work from all of you.

Everyone wants up-to-date information, so the wiki makes complete sense. It is the perfect starting point for all kinds of other ventures; training manuals, published books, study guides, quick summaries......

Accessibility is one of the primary goals of OOo from what I've seen. All published ventures will require up-to-date information and it appears from our discussion that wiki is the easiest way to establish an up-to-date source. I trust the wiki as a starting point will add value of all other ventures by providing an up-to-date and easily accessible source of information.

From what I hear, properly designed filters are able to take any and all information in the wiki and convert it into pretty much any other format desired. This means the up-to-date information will be easily transported to other mediums such as print once the conversions are thoroughly defined in the filter and the information is entered in the wiki.

These converted versions can than be either further edited before published, or used as is.

Content, layout, and readability in any medium will always require editors. Jean, every medium has a particular format and language to which it is best suited. Print materials will be with us for a very long time yet and people with skills as editors and authors are absolutely critical to readability and accessibility of information in any subject.

How about conversion of wiki to an ebook format?

Check below for some comments on that topic.....

http://www.openreader.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=77&Itemid=164

Alan

marbux wrote:
On 8/3/07, Scott Carr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The reason the Wiki is a GOOD direction for this is that, as Wikipedia,
Gentoo-wiki.com, and others show, updating a Wiki and keeping it
current, is vastly easier to do than a document.  People are more apt to
fix a quick issue they find, than if they have to download the document,
fix it, then post it somewhere.

With the Wiki, a change can be made right there.


I think a wiki can be very useful in that regard and there are methods for
expanding its utility, a couple of which I discuss below. My problems with
using Mediawiki flow from it being the wrong tool for developing word
processor-style, long, formatted documents. But I see no real problems with
using a wiki so long as the limitations are recognized; i.e., the wiki could
be a great resource for developing guides, but is the wrong tool for writing
and formatting them.

Expanding the wiki's utility:

1. On encouraging users to contribute to the wiki, as I mentioned before, I
think a tool accessible from the OOo Help menu for submitting contributions
to the wiki would help immensely. An odt-to-mediawiki xslt incorporated in
such a process would also help. An alternative or further option might be to
implement OOWriter as a Mediawiki WebDAV client. <
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WebDAV>.

2. A related barrier is that many people will forego the opportunity if
forced to learn wiki markup to make contributions. An option to use a
WYSYIWYG editor with the wiki would encourage contributions. The Mediawiki
resource page on this issue is at <
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wysiwyg#State_of_WYSIWYG_and_WikiMedia>. An
alternative or further option would be to contribute to WebDAV development
on MediaWiki. <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WebDAV> (OOo is already a
WebDAV client.) See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor_support>.
If such an editor were implemented, attention should be given to make the
editor toolbar icons match OOo icons for identical functions.

3. A prominent link in page templates to a page listing resource tools for
editing Mediawiki pages would provide further encouragement for users to
contribute.

4. Longer term, some thought might be given to the potential need to have
access to wiki content when people are working offline. E.g., many people
still do not have internet access and others must work offline at irregular
times such as when traveling. One option might be an ability to download a
dump of the wiki pages, e.g., in compressed format as a set of static HTML
pages, which then also might be distributable on a CD for people who have no
internet access.

BTW, regarding the problem of transforming absolute URLs into relative URLs
that I discussed in an earlier post, you might experiment with two
programming hooks in Mediawiki, GetLocalURL and GetFullURL. See <
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_hooks>. Documentation is
sparse, but the short descriptions sound worthy of investigation.

Best regards,

Marbux


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