User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/Profile and Message Wall on the Unified Community Platform/@comment-5645428-20200306132223

From what I can gauge, Wikitext in social spaces was never going to survive this process, and this is the long-coming confirmation. It was indicated long ago that MediaWiki-based social features were incredibly problematic on the backend due to how they repurposed the MediaWiki software far beyond the kind of use it was intended for, a framework for creating a crowdsourced web encyclopedia.

The loss of wikitext in social spaces is a fundamentally necessary compromise in this major development procedure. There is no easy way to transfer and retain identical functionality on the new purpose-built social platforms. Proof that social platforms don’t need wikitext to operate effectively - most comments on every single wiki are plain text with simple formatting (still possible on the new platform) + all the other social media billions of people use lack complex formatting yet clearly remain viable. The area of compromise is with those who have been making use of what wikitext offers in terms of its integration of features such as templates and HTML, who will be reduced to a lesser capacity. Fortunately though, these far fewer cases where the technical capacity is more than just-for-fun will still have access to the tried and tested option of talk pages. They might not be as good for quick communication, but then the need for greater technical capacity suggests that users would already need to be more advanced in that respect anyway.

Perhaps in the future after the UCP has shifted further along its timeline, user feedback could highlight cases where the absence of wikitext is causing difficulty. Perhaps a substitute for basic templates for the use of Notices in social spaces might be particularly desirable. A feature for example could be ‘Shorthands’, where moderators can create a small tag which would essentially transclude a longer message to save the time copying and pasting repeatedly.

Some bonus history, back when the features which today have been announced for upgrades were initially released, they received backlash, because people feared that their information-based wikis would deteriorate more into social networks. Talk pages were said to offer superior functionality to message walls (somewhat ironic now), and even the humble Profile was subject to criticism, reasons such as ’lack of necessity on a wiki’. Today we know that these features have been more helpful than harmful. In my honest opinion, despite many stumbles along the way, the future for both the brand and editors here is brighter than it might seem.