Now that Chrome supports progressive web apps on desktop, MediaWiki could allow you to install the web app on your desktop.
There is a checklist of criteria that must be met in order to allow the PWA (progressive web app) to be installed. None of these requirements seem extreme.
Doing this would allow people to use Wikipedia as a "desktop" application with a relatively minimal amount of effort on our part.
What are the benefits that you see with this approach?
I mean, one of the great things about the new PWAs is the use of service workers and lazy loading stuff, which I think is super powerful and could give us a great way to do app-like behavior for our wikis, but that part requires quite a bit more work in the infrastructure, like being able to load the data into the "chrome" of the site, etc. I think this should be something we're aiming for (and I do believe there's some work being done on this already by the mobile web team, but I'm not sure?) but we don't yet have that option.
My attempted point is -- I think that PWAs are great, but without the bigger features, what are we gaining by making Wikipedia a PWA? I think if we put up a list of benefits it will be easier to see why this is worth putting a bit of effort into (and how to plan for more stuff in the future).
Even better, if those benefits lead us towards a list of low-hanging-fruit to fix up to get some nice features that PWAs have (like using it in mobile with some rudamentary service worker caching or something?) we can not only get this to be done -- but we can get this to be done as a potential mentorship project like GSoC or Outreachy.
I think, imho, the benefits would be being able to access Wikipedia directly from the launcher on macOS (and alt+tab).
I certainly think there are more features we could add (offline capability, maybe push notifications for echo notifications, etc.) but at least being able to "add to home screen" feels like a good first step.