Wikipedia but without wikipedia

December 29, 2012 2:21 AM

How can I work in MediaWiki mark-up language without installing MediaWiki locally or using any of the Wikimedia (eg. Wikipedia) projects?

The goal here is to create Wikipedia content but not on Wikipedia, as a scratch page outside of Wikipedia, so once completed it would be a trivial to cut and paste the source into Wikipedia without much conversion needed. (this is for basic markup commands and obviously would not include things like templates). Perferably the space would be private and I would own the content (eg. not a copy-left license).

posted by stbalbach to computers & internet (4 answers total)

This is the link I think you want. It lists all of the text editors that can support mediawiki markup with syntax highlighting. Though I should add that, on a mac that support is more apparent than real in many cases (the textmate and subethaedits ones are not very useful) and I don't know about other platforms.

If however, you want something that allows you to also preview the text as a mediawiki page then I don't know how to do that without using mediawiki.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 4:18 AM on December 29, 2012

Ok I was looking for a way to view the markup. I guess either by someone who has their own MediaWiki installed and open to accounts, or a near-clone of MediaWiki. Or local software that can do it. I've since looked into it and installing MediaWiki locally on Windows while not trivial isn't too terrible by installing XAMPP and then MediaWiki. Seems like overkill for what I'm doing but workable.
posted by stbalbach at 10:31 AM on December 29, 2012

LibreOffice with the Wiki Publisher extension (most newer versions of LibreOffice have this baked into the install; if you are running Linux, you might need to install it from your software repository) might do the trick for you.

You can upload the text directly to the server using the "File - Send - To MediaWiki" feature, but you can also do a "File - Export" and select MediaWiki as the export format to save a text file on your computer with MediaWiki formatting.
posted by 1367 at 11:42 AM on December 29, 2012 [1 favorite]

Thank you, lebt. Good to go with a solution installing MediaWiki and making private, not as difficult as imagined.
posted by stbalbach at 6:25 PM on December 29, 2012