In-place editing is going to be the future of all
collaborative content, or at least, it's hard to imagine
otherwise.
This is possibly the greatest step forward that the
VisualEditor promises to bring Mediawiki. Odd that it was
hardly mentioned in the tldr thread "Odd plans on
Future/Parser_plan - are they true?". Perhaps some people
have not tried the new editor?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox
Let me please not reopen the questions of l33tism or
wikitext whimsey, I simply wanted to state that clicking
directly on the cursor location you want to edit is a big
deal. One's poor brain does not have to shift gears; the
computer actually saves you a little bit of your life (how
often can you say that?); this is a good interface.
...and having a parser in Javascript will really broaden the
horizons for wikipedia: embedding wiki content in another
application, offline editing, abandoning legacy mediawiki
code, to name a few.
-Adam