User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-452-20160908164144/@comment-5275700-20160908183622

Rich-text formatting (bold, italic, lists, embedded links) can be accomplished in many ways besides with wikitext. There's no question about that functionality being useful and we will be exploring different options for rich text in Discussions.

The more complex uses of wikitext, such as template transclusion, are what we want to hear about and see examples. We can assess the scale of usage but there's no replacement for the qualitative descriptions of what users want to accomplish with that. There can be multiple ways to meet needs.

As detailed in DaNASCAT's recent blog post, MediaWiki is not necessarily the starting point for all development at Wikia, and so the points of wikitext & MediaWiki integration don't come "for free" in those cases and require careful consideration.