User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-452-20160908164144

From the FAQ page: "We would like to know more about how you use wiki markup, templates, etc. in forums now to help us understand what needs those are meeting. Give us details and examples!"

...You are Wikia. You have, at your fingertips, access to the entire Wikia database. You do not need to be given examples, you have all of the examples.

Crawl your own database and generate a list of all wikitext markup currently used in forum posts. Sort it by frequency of use links/templates/magic words/whatever, and start implementing them.

The FAQ answer "No. Discussions is not built on MediaWiki." can be translated as "No. We were too lazy".

It makes no sense at all to introduce a Wikia feature which does not allow wikitext.