Comment by eastbound

1 day ago

> Not only that but Markdown use the conventions people already used in text files

So why not Markup? At the time, everyone was using markup because Wikipedia was in wikimarkUP, with # for numbered lists, {} for macros and === to denominate titles. The latter still works in Markdown, but the former doesn’t. Funny heritage: Confluence shortcuts are also expressed in markup because it was the trend at the time, but they changed the shortcuts when they went to the Cloud.

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eastbound

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duskwuff  1 day ago

MediaWiki syntax was its own odd duck. It used '''bold''' and ''italics'', and [https://example.com/ external links like this] - almost nothing else followed their lead.

  • Timwi  3 hours ago

    And for a long time MediaWiki didn't have a proper parser for that markup, just a bunch of regexes that would transform it into HTML. I don't know if they have a proper parser now, but for reasons of backwards compatibility it must be lenient/forgiving, which means that converting all of Wikipedia to markdown is basically impossible now. So MediaWiki markup will stay with us for as long as there are MediaWiki wikis.