Brief description

Convert word docs/pdfs to wiki pages and vice versa.

Detailed description

Reshma 15:11, 23 May 2007 (EDT): At a panel discussion on use of wiki's in education at MIT yesterday, there were several comments from educators that while wiki's were great for collaboration, they aren't great for putting together proper reports. For example, they said that if a group of students start writing stuff up on a wiki, eventually they have to move everything to a Microsoft Word document in order to make a report that was submittable for the class assignment. My guess is that part of this sentiment is psychological ... since the wiki feels like a work in progress, users don't feel as much need to clean up errors and spelling mistakes. And part of this sentiment is the practical problem of it being hard to print out a wiki page and make it look "polished". Right now, since we can compose latex docs on the wiki that look "polished", it shouldn't be very difficult to write an extension that goes from wiki markup direct to a latex-generated PDF. It might be useful to be able to generate a "polished" version of a page.
- Jason R. Kelly 18:05, 24 May 2007 (EDT): This would be especially valuable for the Reviews section. If you wanted to submit a review periodically for peer-review and publication in traditional journals then it would be nice to be able to dump it straight from the wiki.

Skoch3 16:32, 16 July 2007 (EDT):I have a huge number of word documents that I would like to convert to wiki so I can easily post old protocols and summary write-ups. Here is an example file that would probably be challenging to convert: Media:031203 His Tag Strength Summary.doc.
- OK, I tried the Word->HTML->Wiki method that Ilya recommended (see Converting documents to mediawiki markup). The result of the above document is here: User:Skoch3/His-tag lifetime. It worked pretty well. Having a completely automated process would be better, of course, but maybe not worth the effort?--Skoch3 18:19, 17 July 2007 (EDT)