MissionTechWiki:FAQ
From MissionTechWiki
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Pasting
Is there a way to paste formated text into WIKI? For example I have a MS Word Document or a HTML Page I want to paste into a WIKI page. How do I do this?
If you have an answer please post it?
See this page for info on including HTML in wiki pages http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:HTML_in_wikitext --DavidM 10:18, 21 July 2006 (EST)
- Actually, Minister, the answer is yes... and no.
- I assume you mean you want to preserve the formatting. Pasting the text is not particularly difficult. There are many possible ways to preserve the formatting, depending on the wiki and your client setup. But in general, it's neither possible nor desirable to do this.
- Wikis work best when the wikitext is kept simple. It's pointless giving someone permission to update a wiki if you then strangle their ability to do so by requiring that they learn HTML, or install MS-Word (or both), in order to do it.
- So, although it might be possible to, for example, save an MS-Office document as HTML and then cut and paste that HTML into a wiki, it's probably not a good thing to do, even if it seems to work on your browser.
- Also bear in mind that many (not all) wikis deliberately restrict the HTML tags available (MediaWiki, the software used for missiontechwiki, does this). And probably all wikis generate HTML that makes at least some tags misbehave even if the wiki software accepts them. No matter how you cut-and-paste, it's going to end up as HTML. The more elaborate the formatting, the greater the probability that somewhere, someone's browser is going to choke on it. OK, a decent browser will just ignore the ill-formed tags, but what will that do to the formatting? If it matters, then again you've excluded someone. If it doesn't matter, then you're just wasting time and bandwidth.
- It's a near-certainty that the formatting which looks great on your client will look ridiculous (at best) on some other platforms.
- If you want to make formatted documents available as part of a wiki, it's generally better to save them as files rather than as wiki pages. Again, some wikis support this better than others, and some not at all. Have a look at this little experiment for how it can work. Andrewa 04:34, 26 July 2006 (EST)