Using a wiki for a simple writing project 
While wiki guru Stewart Mader wrote a book using a wiki, in my experiments with a wiki as a writing tool I’ve started off small. No books (at least for now); instead, I’ve been writing articles using DokuWiki.
Getting set up
The article that I’ve been focusing on are a series of [TechTips](http://www.techtipsblog.com] that I do weekly — well, more or less. The structure of these articles is fairly simple — two or three levels of heading, some bold or italic text, and that’s about it. But I had to do some preparation in order to keep everything organized.
First, I set up a namespace, which is something like a category or directory for grouping similar documents. The parent namespace I called writing. Since I have three separate gigs (and do some other writing as well), I decided to create child namespaces below writing. In this case, that namespace is techtips. Not incredibly inspired naming, I admit, but it works.
In addition to the set of plugins that I have to expand my wiki’s capabilities, I installed one that enables me to export files in ODT format. More on this later.
Getting down to work
I added a new page in the techtips namespace, and started to write. Yes, it is that simple. Wherever needed, I added formatting — like headings or character formatting — and put placeholders for the images that I planned to send with the article (the people at the other end insert the images in the published articles).
Once I’d done a draft of the article, I let it sit while I went off and did some other work. After a few hours, I went back to the article, read the draft, and made whatever additions or corrections I thought were necessary. Then, I did a spelling check.
Getting the article out of DokuWiki
I haven’t yet tried to get my editors to collaborate using my wiki. So, I have to pull the content off the wiki and send it to them in a format that they can use. In this case, Word. That’s where the ODT export plugin that I mentioned earlier comes in. ODT is a format that applications like OpenOffice.org Writer, AbiWord, and Google Docs can read. Best of all, the conversion from wiki to ODT is fast and the resulting document preserves the paragraph and character styles. There’s no substituting, for example, 18 point Normal bold for Heading 1.
Word can’t handle ODT files (without using a balky plugin), but each of the applications that I mentioned can save ODT files as Word documents. Since the layout and formatting of the articles is simple, nothing is lost in the translation between formats.
Looking forward
While I do plan to use DokuWiki to write a longer work, I’ve yet to devise a strategy for doing so. Until then, I’ll keep using DokuWiki to write articles and to take notes.
More on this subject in a future post …
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[...] I’ve mentioned in this space before, I use a wiki called DokuWiki for a number of my smaller writing projects. [...]