Working With MediaWiki

LibreOffice), and the lesser-known DocBook and ZIM.
    PdfBookis another extension that can create PDF files from wiki pages:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PdfBook
    PdfBook is easier to set up and run than Collection, although the display of the PDF files that PdfBook generates is not nearly as nice.
    Another extension is Wiki2LaTeX, which can export wiki pages to LaTeX format, and then additionally from LaTeX to PDF:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wiki2LaTeX

22  Running a successful wiki
    So you’re planning your wiki, and you inevitably reach the question that almost everyone who creates a wiki asks: will anyone use this thing? It’s a question common, of course, to nearly every website, and more broadly to nearly every new venture in the world, whether it’s a company, product, or blog post. For wikis, though, it’s in a sense double the uncertainty, because you’re hoping your future users will not only read the content, but create it. Which is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: if there’s little or no real content at the beginning, then people won’t read it, but if you have no readers, then you can’t expect anyone to start contributing. Thankfully, the situation is not as bleak as that might sound. There are two basic kinds of wikis: public, general-use ones; and private wikis, for internal use by companies and organizations. To this, we’ll add one more group that’s somewhere between these two: public wikis for loosely-affiliated organizations, where the content is meant to be edited mainly by members of, or people connected to, that organization. For all three of these cases, the dynamics of having a successful wiki are surprisingly similar. Still, there are important differences between the three, so, after some general thoughts on wikis, we’ll discuss each case separately.
    So, how do you convince people to start contributing to your wiki? This can be a challenge, even if, for the case of organizational wikis, contributing is now ostensibly part of their job. Most people have never edited a wiki. The situation today is of course different from 1995, when wikis were invented, or from 2001, when Wikipedia was created — many more people have experience editing wikis now, but compared to the overall population the number is still tiny. So, whatever set of people you want to contribute to your wiki, a sizable number of them, and most likely the vast majority, have never hit an "edit" tab before.
    So you’re facing an uphill battle. On the other hand, you have to your advantage the same thing that has driven the success of every other wiki, which can be summarized as a basic human need to improve things, to bring what’s on the screen closer to complete accuracy. If people care about the subject matter, they will inherently want the wiki to be better.
    Getting people to contribute to a wiki thus basically consists of two parts: finding people who care about the subject matter, and eliminating all of the obstacles that stand in the way of their natural inclination to improve things.
    Finding people who care about the subject matter, or making sure that the relevant people in your organization care about it, is a challenge that depends on the type of wiki it is, so we’ll cover that in additional sections.
    Removing obstacles, then, is what we’ll focus on. In our experience, the biggest thing that prevents people from editing content that they might naturally be inclined to is simply fear: people are afraid to edit wikis because they don’t want to do the wrong thing. An incorrect edit could mess up the display of the page, or cause more work for others, or even bring complaints against them at some future time.
    That’s why the use of Semantic Forms (Chapter 17 ) is strongly recommended. Forms let people edit pages with much more confidence, and with a type of interface they’re used to already. We really believe forms are a "game-changer", as far as getting new users to contribute.
    Even the combination of MediaWiki and Semantic Forms isn’t perfect, though: one big thing that’s missing is a good WYSIWYG editor for the "free text" of a page. Editing-wise, that’s the big advantage that some other wiki applications have over MediaWiki. This is something that MediaWiki developers are working on as we speak, though, and by early 2013 there may be a solution in place. (See here .)
    Besides forms, it helps to have clear instructions. The front page is especially