'' and ''' are not the worst offenders. There's also various numbers of equal-signs and dashes, colons and so on. All of which accomplishes nothing that the equivalent and more widely used HTML (and thus more widely known) doesn't also.
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of tarquin Sent: Saturday, July 27, 2002 13:35 To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Parsing
<discussion of "deprecated" snipped>
In response to Sean Barrett: I find that Wiki markup has so few rules they've stuck pretty quickly. However, if '' and ''' are cryptic to you, don't use them. Stick to plain text, and the only thing you need to remember is "\n\n" makes a paragraph break. A well-written article has formatting as a mere embellishment: it is clear without it.
[Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l