You should identify whether you mean "MediaWikitext", or some other dialect -- MediaWiki Is Not The Only Wiki...
and you should post to wikitext-l as well. The real parser maniacs hang out over there, even though traffic is low.
It is MediaWiki's Wikitext; elsewhere it is usually called wiki markup.
Improperly and incompletely, perhaps, yes.
I'm a MW partisan, and think it's better than nearly all its competitors, for nearly all uses... but even I try not to be *that* partisan.
Hmm, never viewed it that way. IMO, MediaWiki (developers) invented a wiki markup language and called it Wikitext; other engines just call it wiki markup or what not. For me, Wikitext always was the particular markup of MediaWiki, much like php or C++ are particular language names.
Is there any other engine that calls it's markup Wikitext? I'd be surprised. Even for WikiCreole wikicreole.org we used wiki markup.
Cheers, Dirk