Are any desktop WYSIWYG editors for MediaWiki / wiki available?

Question

MediaWiki is very good, but for programming tasks editing it via the web is not very handy since WYSIWYG is very limited. Pressing 'edit' + 'publish' on any small change and waiting for page loading is kind of annoying. I have seen a lot of desktop wikis (personal wikis) that are free from such problems. The best example is WikidPad that has a usage pattern of 'focus, edit wiki in-place, minimize'.

Does a desktop application exists that can connect to MediaWiki and allows to view and edit it via a rich WYSIWYG editor? Any hints are welcomed.

Answer 1

Not really. For an explanation and a list of imperfect options, read this page.

However, you might not need a WYSIWYG editor in order to make many quick edits to a wiki. It is possible to download the wikitext of a page, edit it locally, and submit the changes. There are scripts (called bots) available which do this. One example is pywikipediabot's "editarticle.py" script. You might also want to take a look at AutoWikiBrowser.

Answer 2

It's not quite WYSIWYG, but wikEd adds a few more editor options in the form of a Greasemonkey script, so you can use it for any MediaWiki instance, even if you're not an admin:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/12529

Also, see this page for a list of WYSIWYG options, some of which you can install on your instance of MediaWiki if you have full control over it:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor

The TinyMCE patch might be what you're looking for,