Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-168424-20151014200720/@comment-24473195-20151014220741

SethFu wrote: I'd be all up for HTML-only editing. Making people learn a made-up language that's only used on (some) wikis so they don't have to learn a widely-used, standard-defined language they can use anywhere has always seemed particularly silly to me. It had its benefits in the beginning. Being a shortcut to regular html, and also the fact that it is a whole lot easier to sanitize (prevent security exploits) wikitext.

But generally speaking it is/was a failure as a markup language because even other non-Wikimedia wikis don't support it fully or built their own variants and hacks.

That being said, HTML places a medium/high requirement on contributors. It is hard enough matching infinite curly brackets, matching up tags would be far worse. Writing pages with wikitext also requires knowledge of its markup, but it is not as hard to learn as html5.

Ultimately even markdown is better because it is widely used in a lot of software, and there is a group actively creating specs and standards for it.