Markdown

If we can use HTML as an intermediate form (phab:T127329) to allow editors to work with an alternative language, wikitext 2.0 or Grunge, while still converting back to wikitext 1.0 for storage–or to use wikitext 2.0 for storage while letting editors still work with wikitext 1.0 if they prefer–you might logically wonder… why does the new thing need to look like wikitext at all?

Markdown is one alternative. It was created in 2004, shortly after wikitext's creation in 2002, and there are currently 166 million markdown files being parsed at a rate of 1,300 per second on github alone. In comparison, Wikipedia has 65 million articles written in wikitext with parsing happening at a rate of roughly 5 per second.

Markdown has a far larger user base, with a specification and a large number of independent implementations in a variety of programming languages, while wikitext is only used by MediaWiki.

However, Markdown has no (standardized) extension or transclusion mechanism.  Before Markdown can be used for wiki projects, a reasonable syntax for wikitext transclusions (templates, extension tags, parser functions, and probably media) needs to be invented.  If you can figure out how to make those into Markdown, then there’s nothing stopping you from adding "Markdown" as a MediaWiki editor alongside wikitext 1.0 and HTML.  We did a rough prototype of this, and it would look something like:

Again, the big catch here is: Markdown does not have a template or extension mechanism.  You need to invent some non-standard syntax for transclusions, and that probably includes images.

Next section: HTML-only wikis