Tim Chambers wrote:
The old e-mail and Usenet news convention is to use _italics_ and *boldface*.
I personally don't use '' and ''' because I can never remember which is which. I use <i> and <b>, which come from html, and strike me as more intuitive for the newcomer.
But wikipedia supports both, of course.
objective to make content creation as easy as possible. Of course, that doesn't explain why he settled on CamelCase,
Well, I think CamelCase is consistent with making content creation as easy as possible. It's "transparent" as it looks the same in editing and in the output. It looks _silly_ in the output, which is why we are no longer using it at Wikipedia, but it certainly makes it easy for newcomers to get started.
But [[]] are also super-easy, of course.
--Jimbo