Am 10.04.2017 um 06:17 schrieb Denny Vrandečić:
Ah, good question indeed. The reason is that users would be actually putting fragments of wikitext into the JSON structure, and then the JSON structure gets assembled into wikitext. Not only would I prefer to have the users work with fragments of wikitext than fragments of HTML, but some things are almost impossible with HTML - e.g. making internal links red or blue depending on the existence of the article, etc.
Why JSON? JSON is an absolute pain to edit by hand. HTML/XML, as annoying as it is, is still much better for that than JSON is. And Wikitext is designed to mix well with HTML.