E. coli is indeed the coolest thing on the planet - Carl Zimmer

From EcoliWiki

Although we think the wiki markup system isn't that hard to learn, some users may prefer to edit using a more familiar software package. Here are some options

• Making wiki text from Word or Excel Docs

These are not for beginners, and we have not tried them ourselves:

• Setting up Eclipse to edit wiki pages If you don't already know what Eclipse is, I suspect that this is harder than just learning the wiki syntax.
• Setting up Emacs to edit wiki pages

See also this page on Meta