Help:Converting the Heathen

Why bother converting?

At the moment most of our knowledge that is written down is in the form of pdf's, word documents and other office documents and not in the wiki markup that this Knowledgebase uses.

We can and should upload and embed these documents in the wiki however file formats such as these have some disadvantages.
 * 1) Hard to find: The documents are not indexed by the wiki. They have something useful in them but there is no quick way to discover it
 * 2) Hard to edit: The documents are fixed. We could edit and re-upload them but there would be no way to see who did what
 * 3) Hard to stay current: Because these documents are fixed, they can date rapidly.
 * 4) Hard to view: You can find the page they are on swiftly but you need to download, open an application and view to see what is in them

The wiki has these advantages:
 * 1) Easy to find: you just search. It is easy to add in links to knit the whole database together.
 * 2) Easy to edit: it really is not that hard! And much easier than using making a website in html!
 * 3) Easy to keep current: When you see an inaccuracy you change it and... it is up to date again.
 * 4) Easy to view: When you get the the page you are on the page. If a page is well structured you can see at a glance from the table of contents where the stuff you want to see is.

Conversion tools

 * Word documents: there is a macro available here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Word_macros#Word2MediaWiki
 * PDF2wiki converter web page (upload pdf to Knowledgebase first): User:Kevin_pdf2wiki
 * HTML2wiki: An online hi-quality wiki to html utility written in Perl. http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/html2wiki/index.html (If you really struggle with the Word-to-Wiki conversion then try Word-HTML-Wiki with this utility. You may have some success)

The Best Conversion Tool
The best conversion tool is now OpenOffice version 2.3 (and above). OpenOffice will allow you to load all Word docs, RTF files, even old WordPerfect files.

You then simply EXPORT and chose 'MediaWiki' as the format. The resulting text file contains the markup. Paste the text into your wiki document. Great!

Successful Conversion
Use styles to ensure headings are converted properly. Many documents have headings that are applied with simple formatting, these will not convert. Adding styles to headings is easy - press F11 in Open office, select a paragraph and click on the style list to apply a style. Try to create a good hierarchy of styles. The conversion process will be more successful this way.

In OpenOffice to strip out excess formatting select the text, right click and choose the "Default Formatting" option.