The MediaWiki experience can be as frustrating to a hacker as it is for a newbie. Editing on the Web page is annoying and the syntax is atrocious. For myself, I prefer using Markdown syntax, a good text editor, pandoc , and a distributed version control system (VCS). (That's how I wrote my book.)
I, and others, crave a similar toolset for editing MediaWikis. I tried WikipediaFS once, but looking at a versioned wiki as a simple filesystem didn't do the trick and the project is unmaintained. The mvs Mediawiki client comes with Ubuntu, but I could never get it to work. wikish is OK but doesn't do all that I would like.
Recently, I stumbled upon Ian Weller's
mw
, "VCS-like
nonsense for MediaWiki websites". He provides a great foundation and the basic
pull
,
diff
,
commit
and
status
commands. Since it's written in Python, I could actually
grok it, extend
pull
so it can pull new updates and warn of
conflicts, and provide simple
merge
functionality.
You can see examples of the pull, conflict, and merge functionality in a short MW tutorial I drafted.