Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist <at> gmail.com> writes:
Wikitext is not easy to edit.
It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of edits; and way more comfortable than WYSIWYG. Wikis require a certain hacker mentality - not in the technical sense, but a desire to understand things in depth. It takes effort to learn the syntax, but once you did, it gives you freedom and effectiveness, because you are actually in control of things (as opposed to rich text editors which sometimes do something similar to what you intended, at other times not even close, because they use some fucked-up internal representation that you have no way of knowing or understanding). This might be a problem for Wikia with its fanboi target demographic that has the attention span of a Naruto episode, but Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and writing a good encyclopedia article requires hacker mentality in the first place, so whatever.
And then there is the ecosystem of bots, gadgets and other third-party tools which is based on wikitext, and not only would moving away from wikitext a huge maintenance burden, but again it would be replaced with something that is way less intuitive and actually harder to use (simple text operations are somewhat easier than fooling around with document trees).
So if you can do WYSIWYG on top of wikitext, cool (the learning curve is certainly steep for new users, and that will only become worse as new features are added). If you can do a sort of WYSIWYM with syntax highlighting, context-sensitive help and wizards for the more inconvenient elements like templates, that is even better, because it wouldn't create a gap between people using WYSIWYG and wikitext, and would allow for a gradual learning experience. But replacing wikitext with some sort of internal representation that is unreadable for humans would be a huge mistake IMO.