William Allen Simpson wrote:
Actually, Jay, you must not go back in usenet far enough, because those actually *WERE* the old markup. Underscores are _underlines_ and slashes are /italics/ (probably because of the association with slant).
Either way, I think this was discussed within the Wikipedia community in 2001, when the project was less than a year old, and the conclusion was that it could well have been the right thing to do, but it was too late to change because there were already more than 10,000 articles or something like that.
Nothing really stops you from downloading the latest dump, convert it to your own favorite format, and set up your own fork. But I don't think any discussions will lead wikipedia.org to change.
You could even start alt.dumps.wikipedia where you post an article (converted to Usenet markup) each hour for the next 125 years.