Projects/TaskList/MediaWiki Editing in OpenOffice

Currently editing media wiki requires one to know wiki formatting, though it is simple for most cases, it can be quite complex once we arts using it for complex things like a table. Open Office already supports exporting contents to MediaWiki format, but it is not to edit a page directly. This project would glue MediaWiki and Open Office via Firefox (possibly a new protocol that other browsers also can accept).

One possible approach

• Media wiki will have expose its content via a new protocol possibly webdav
• Firefox should know this protocol (either default or by a plugin)
• Open Office should support this protocol in addition to ability to save to local files
  • Optionally browsing, searching and directly editing a wiki, given a url

Starting Points

• Wiki Publisher extention can send documents to mediawiki alread http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher We can extend this plugin to be able to receive it as well.
• Its All Text firefox extention allows editing text areas in outside applications https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125/

Second approach

Just use Open Office libraries and create a stand alone client for media wiki - suggested by Sankarshan. Most of code cane be re used from or even extend lekhonee

Advantage

Open Office already have capability of handling media wiki format, adding ability to edit wikis will help reduce entry barrier to wikis especially for a project like wikipedia. mediawiki does not have a desktop editor and this aims to create one.