I've just experimented a bit with ZWiki. ZWiki has a very basic WebDAV editing capability. That means that I can, say, use the KDE text editor Kate, select "Open file .." and enter
webdav://zwiki.org/SandBox
to edit the SandBox. Strangely enough that returns an HTML file instead of the wiki source, but otherwise it works reasonably well -- I can save directly to the server.
WebDAV can also be mounted via DavFS or gnome-vfs and be treated like a regular FS. On Windows systems WebDAV folders can be viewed almost like normal ones (although I'm told that editing files isn't transparent - you get a local copy which you have to copy to the server manually).
So I think it would be quite neat to have WebDAV editing capabilities for Wikipedia. Is there someone who wants to take that project? If not I might hack together a proof-of-concept, but I've got lots of other stuff in my queue ..
On CPAN I found HTTP::DAVServer - "allows you to write server-side functions to accept, process and respond to WebDAV client requests." It appears to hook into the Apache module mod_dav.
The tricky part would be stuff like authentication (the DAV server would have to reimplement our password hashing function), CUR/OLD table queries for revision storage, and handling edit conflicts reasonably well (could use the unix command line tool merge, or various libraries, to generate an auto-merged version with conflict markers). But I think it's very much doable, and probably no more than a weekend's work. It could make editing a lot of more fun and lead to other interesting developments (WebDAV editing with realtime chat, WYSIWYG ...).
So - any takers?
Regards,
Erik