As groups develop wikis and build knowledge bases around them, there has been an increasing demand for tools and techniques to use information in a wiki as the source content for various types of publishing. These types of activities fall into a variety of scenarios, including the following possibilities:
None of these is particularly difficult to implement. As we mentioned earlier in the book, most wikis have an underlying markup language, called wiki text, that is used to denote both the structure and format of the content. While the specifics of the wiki text markup may vary from wiki to wiki, most wikis today, and certainly all of the most popular ones, include an ability to convert the content from the underlying proprietary wiki text to industry standard markup languages such as HTML (for web display) or XML (for publishing).
Once information is in a wiki, it isn’t locked there; building and growing a wiki isn’t the end point of a project. In many cases it can be the start of using that content in new ways that may not have been previously available.