Nikola Smolenski <smolensk <at> eunet.rs> writes:
What I am going to say is going to be the worst heresy, but could this problem be solved by gradually migrating to a new wiki markup, for example **bold** and //italic//? This markup is more logical and easier to remember, more used outside of MediaWiki (unofficial email markup is similar) and more easily visible than apostrophe markup, and I never understood how the apostrophes came to be in the first place. The most important for this discussion - it also has much less potential to confuse the parser.
You avoid a lot of pain if the opening and closing markup is different. That is IMHO the other big problem besides reusing the same characters in ''/''' and {{/{{{.