I'm using 'turn-on-auto-fill' and 'fill-column' (72 resp. 79) for text mode and related modes. And I use fill commands to make the text look nice.
Ah, you're an idiocyncratic line-breaker. You should know that if I had my way you'd be locked up. ;)
Seriously, *your* ideal column width and *my* ideal column width are not always going to be the same. If your lines are longer than my edit box, I see ragged broken lines and text does *not* look nice. If your lines are shorter than my edit box, I see a lot of annoyingly short lines and text does *not* look nice. This has been an endemic problem for years in email and usenet, and I've no desire to see it in wiki.
Another disadvantage of line-wrapping is that in the search function, the 'context' information contains less information. Also, if an article gets edited, the line length will be broken, unless the person doing the editing is willing to spend quite a bit of time making things 'look nice' again which isn't visible on the page at all - in which case the 'changes' page is not going to do its function well. Not to mention that the 'changes' page is already unusable when linebreaking is added or removed.
Andre Engels