An easier way to write Mediawiki pages

One of my colleague has circulated email for MediaWiki. Following is extract from his email :

For any of you that struggle with the wiki syntax, as I do, you might find it easier to use OpenOffice, a free alternative to Microsoft Office. Writer (their version of Word) will export in MediaWiki format. So you can write your document in OpenOffice, then export to MediaWiki. As you can also open Word documents in Writer then export them. This is quite handy if you want to create a document that you can send out, but also share on the wiki.

You can download it here: http://www.openoffice.org/

A couple of limitations I've found are:

1. Image support is, well, non existant really. If you have an image in your document, it'll put a placeholder in the wiki text, but no more. But it's a start I guess.

2. Tables are all set with a default class="prettytable". None of the border or other such formatting settings are created. However, the data is in the right places (which is always the bit that gives me a headache) so adding border="1" at the top etc isn't too traumatic once the table is there.

3. Certain text sections get exported wrapped in tags. The best example is that if you have a snippet of XML in a document, it'll wrap that in so that the XML tags aren't interpreted. This makes using the wiki code syntax highlighter* a little harder, but it's not too hard to strip out the and then wrap with a tag instead.