🐫Mediawiki Markup

MediaWiki has its own markup, they call it wiki markup. This is the first lightweight markup I had experience with (if you do not consider PHPBB markup to be lightweight).

Why I don't like it

  • Syntax for bold and italic. ''italic'' and '''bold'''. This is classic! This syntax comes from very first wikis. But it's bad:

    • Easy to confuse '' and " when editing in proportional font. This alone is enough.

    • Six characters in total for one of the most used emphases (bold) is kinda uh.

    • Not available on the standard Russian keyboard layout.

  • Headings have to be closed at the end: 

    == heading ==

    And they also haven't resolved the level 1 problem.

  • Indentation-based preformatted text.

  • Inclusion of HTML tags such as <br> and pseudo-HTML tags such as <nowiki>.

  • Support of inline styling. Sure, because of that there are Mediawiki wikis with really good visuals, but you know the problems.

  • Ridiculous linking of namespaces File and Category.

  • Two different syntaces for local links and external links: 

    [https://example.org text after space]
[[article | text after bar]]

  • List items are limited to one paragraph.

  • The syntax for image insertion is the same as linking a text page, except it's different.

  • Tables that are so strong they replace everything not supported by the markup.

  • Magic words like NOTOC and #REDIRECT.

  • Wrong line-break logic.

And for some reason, on mature MediaWiki wikis, almost every page is filled with countless {{}}s.

Why I like it

Still much better than Markdown.

  • Bracketed links.

  • Character-repetition-based list nesting.

  • = for headings.

  • Tables are useful.

  • The colon element is cute.

  • Good macros (called templates).