David Gerard wrote:
The advantage of wikitext for mere humans is that it starts working as plain text, then you can add wikitext soup to it and you still get a result that nontechnical people can read and write.
Wikitext is formally horrible, but seems to work with human editors. Wikipedia is one of those wonderful pieces of technology that works for technophobes *and* advanced geeks (e.g. Mac OS X, LiveJournal, Firefox)
- which I think should be a goal of all programs where possible, btw.
People learn wikitext like learning a language. They try stuff and it gets meaning across. They learn more and it gets more of the meaning across. They gain proficiency as they go.
This is perhaps one of the factors in Wikipedia's success.
For people who want to write text only the only essential wiki knowledge may be to add an extra carriage return to separate paragraphs.
Ec