Wikipedia has a number of tips for people who like to edit Wikipedia articles with VIM.

Of course, it all starts with opening an article in VIM. How I do this depends on my mood: I can open it by firing GVIM using Vimperator or I can mount the wiki with WikipediaFS. I prefer the latter.

Spell-checking

One tool that’s very convenient for editing large sections of prose is VIM’s built-in spell-checker. Example:

set textwidth=0
set spell spelllang=nl

Wrapping, matching and folding

There’s some more useful stuff that I copied to “ftplugin/mediawiki.vim” in “$HOME/.vim/“:

" Wikipedia articles often only have line-breaks at the end of each paragraph,
" a situation Vim by default doesn't handle as other text editors.
setlocal wrap linebreak
setlocal textwidth=0

" No auto-wrap at all
setlocal formatoptions-=tc formatoptions+=l
if v:version >= 602 | setlocal formatoptions-=a | endif

" Make navigation more amenable to the long wrapping lines.
noremap  k gk
noremap  j gj
noremap   gk
noremap   gj
noremap  0 g0
noremap  ^ g^
noremap  $ g$
noremap D dg$
noremap C cg$
noremap A g$a
inoremap   gk
inoremap   gj

" utf-8 should be set if not already done globally
setlocal fileencoding=utf-8
setlocal matchpairs+=<:>

" Treat lists, indented text and tables as comment lines and continue with the
" same formatting in the next line (i.e. insert the comment leader) when hitting
"  or using "o".
setlocal comments=n:#,n:*,n:\:,s:{\|,m:\|,ex:\|}
setlocal formatoptions+=roq

" match HTML tags (taken directly from $VIM/ftplugin/html.vim)
if exists("loaded_matchit")
    let b:match_ignorecase=0
    let b:match_skip = 's:Comment'
    let b:match_words = '<:>,' .
    \ '<\@<=[ou]l\>[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=li\>:<\@<=/[ou]l>,' .
    \ '<\@<=dl\>[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=d[td]\>:<\@<=/dl>,' .
    \ '<\@<=\([^/][^ \t>]*\)[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=/\1>'
endif

" Other useful mappings
" Insert a matching = automatically while starting a new header.
inoremap   = =(getline('.')==''\|\|getline('.')=~'^=\+$')?"==\Left>":"="

" Enable folding based on ==sections==
:set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^\\(=\\+\\)[^=]\\+\\1\\(\\s*\\)\\=\\s*$'?\">\".(len(matchstr(getline(v:lnum),'^=\\+'))-1):\"=\"
:set fdm=expr

To have this automatically executed when opening files ending in .mw:

"autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.mw setfiletype mediawiki" > $HOME/.vim/ftdetect/mediawiki.vim

Syntax highlighting

Additionally, if you want to have syntax highlighting for MediaWiki articles, you can save this syntax file to $HOME/.vim/syntax/mediawiki.vim.