You're right Aubrey nevertheless while promoving a user friendly interface the result is that data and wiki code is extremely difficult to use as a clean "data base". Think only to wiki markup and the "simple" trick to mark bold and italic text with apostophes.... very user friendly, but something like a nightmare for a poor programmer which needs to find the algorithm to understand which apostophes are text and which are code. The server too can't solve solve apostrophes concatenation. Was it less user friendly to use something like <b>...</b>? Yes; but.... how much cleaner raw wiki text would be!
Distributed Proofreaders uses a completely different approach: there's a rigid set of increasing abilitations for users, and unexperienced users can do simple task only. This is far from "wiki mentality", but we can't expect to keep things too much easy.
Alex