There's API that provides much richer features and allows to do that in a much more manageable way: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

Our external editor support currently exists together with API, then why not this?

I got this idea when I was editing an image on [[commons:]] with GIMP and had opened the image using "Open Location" command in GIMP but then I found it impossible to save my change to the server directly, and I think our current external editing implementation is ugly. This should be a replacement of the current external editing "protocol".

How is GIMP supposed to authenticate? How will it provide edit/upload summaries? Minor edit flags? How it will handle edit conflicts? When you realize that your way ofpage access should be able to accomplish all of that (and lots of other things), you'll realize that you'll have to reimplement our current API for a very little benefit, and that your GIMP will be unable to use it anyway.

Maybe not for GIMP, but I think our external editing solution is really ugly.

(In reply to comment #4)

Maybe not for GIMP, but I think our external editing solution is really ugly.

Yes. The fact that we still support it is really ugly. External editors should be rewritten to use the API. If the API doesn't provide all features, open bugs to add the features. As far as I'm concerned, any sort of programmatic interface should NOT use index.php.

Agreed.

With File uploads, and full editing capabilities (and no outstanding major bugs for the API), it's more than servicable for the functionality.

Granted, there are quite a few feature requests open, and a few bugs (non major) open, but still.