How do I track changes to documents that I have uploaded to my wiki. When others open the files and edit, then save, the file on my wiki is not changed.

I think you are missing the point of the wiki.

Copy the content of the documents into the wiki. They let everyone edit the wiki pages. If you subscribe to the RSS feed or notifications you get the changes as they are made.

If a document is long, break each section of the document into a separate wiki page.

Hi Ray,

Unfortunately you cannot do this with pbwiki. You can copy the contents from the document and paste them into a new wiki page. All changes can be tracked then. However, this is fraught with problems. When you copy and paste from a Word document for example, pbwiki doesn't render the content properly and it looks horrible. Sometimes you cannot edit the content properly. Trust me i have tried & complained to pbwiki about many times with no avail. Even if you manage to do this succesfully, there is no relaible way to output or export the page to a word or pdf for example. The former is not supported at all and you while you can output the page as a pdf. The result is not very good because the plugin is not that sophisticated. I doesn't support tables or complex formatting. Frankly, its rubbish. You need something like Google docs (http://docs.google.com/) or Zoho Writer (www.zoho.com). Both are very good (and free) for doing exactly what you want. Unfortunately, you don't get all the functionality of a wiki when you use these. Some people think that online document management and wikis are two different concepts. I don't agree and it is only a matter of time before a wiki platform supprts this functionality.

Regards,

Seanmac

PS Yes Chris, to answer your question, better desktop integration would be most welcome.

Thanks, Chris - The ability to post documents such as spreadsheets or powerpoints, and of course, Word docs would be huge for me and I suspect for many in the university.

We often work on committees both for the university, but also with community groups of up to 50 people or more trying to devise a mission statement or planning document. It would really be nice to be able to put up a document and allow folks the chance to respond at their convenience. Requiring people to come to meetings in the evening in order to participate in a process ususally means a lot of folks never give their input.

If this were possible, it would make your service worth a subscription for me and others in the university community.

Ray

Chris -
I am new to the world of wiki... I was hoping that it would allow me to build templates that people could then use to write content. We focus mostly on end-user training and write out the common tasks with procedures. Like Ray mentioned, I want members of the team to be able to make changes, but also track those changes. I really wanted something that allowed us to focus more on content and less on presentation as most editing programs (whether you are using Word or FrameMaker) mix the two. I want course developers to start thinking in terms of "data". Still trying to get my thoughts together - we are looking at Content Management Systems at my company, but CMSs are quite expensive... We do need to be able to assemble all the content at some point and apply the presentation layer to it. The templates and tags would ensure consistency among writers/developers. How possible is this? I am almost thinking that we need both Import (Save to wiki) and Export (Save to PC) functionality.

Hi Dutch,

Have you tried creating your own PBwiki and investigating how the system works? If not, you should try it. Experiment - try creating some pages, adding tags, creating templates, etc, and invite one or two of your colleagues to do the same.

As for your question, i didn't entirely understand all of the language you used (I'm a student - no business experience). However, if you're just talking about word-processing, it seems like everything you're looking for is already available in PBwiki.

(1) Focus on content rather than presentation: One of the key features of PBwiki is its relative simplicity (meaning it's easy to add content), and it doesn't have many features relating to presentation - which can be bad if you are concerned about presentation, but it's good if you want people to focus on content.

(2) Templates: PBwiki allows you to create a template just like any other page, and then tag it with a 'template' tag. After that, any new page can use that page as a template. I'm not sure if that's what you meant, though.

(3) Importing: If you create and edit all of your content within the wiki, you should only have to import content once at most - by copying and pasting all existing content to wiki pages when you first create the wiki. However, keep in mind that content copied from word may not come out like you want it when copied into pbwiki (if the formatting is simple, you should be alright).

(4) Exporting: If you're using the wiki for edits, then the only time you should have to 'export' is when you've finished adding content and you just want to do the presentation. I'm not sure, but I expect that copying straight from the wiki page into word should work fine. The formatting for pbwiki is simpler than word, so I would hope word can handle it. But anyway, as with the other points, the best way to find out is to test it yourself.

So, I hope that helps.

The main problem I can think of that you might have is keeping the wiki organised. As yet, there aren't many features for organising pages on PBwiki, so you have to have a system and try to make sure everyone sticks to it. "PBwiki 2.0" will have a folder system which will probably make things a lot easier (but again, people have to use it properly).

Anyway, good luck in your search. Hope you find what you're looking for.
- David

I don't get it. What, then, is the value of a wiki if the participants cannot react to a document by making comments/changes/suggestions on the document itself?

Can the content of a pbwiki page be exported / saved as a text file and then opened in a word processing program like Word? Or would you always need to cut and paste? Also, are there any limits to the word count on a pbwiki page. I ask these questions because I would like to have a group of people working collaboratively on a page and then, after the content is in place, have a document formated in a word processor.
Thanks for any help / suggestions
John