----- Original Message -----
From: "Oliver Keyes" okeyes@wikimedia.org
(1) relatively tech-savvy and (2) willing to jump through unnecessary hoops if you want to contribute, you highlight this; a custom extension is an awkward way of doing things. and an unnecessary hoop. A custom extension designed to work with a specific piece of software that is largely not used by the general population is similarly going to restrict who can participate, for precisely the same reasons that the existing markup is a restriction.
Nearly thirty years experience on the net, starting in '83 with Usenet, leave me entirely unconvinced that the underlying argument here -- that the extra layer of filtering involved in having to *want* to contribute enough to dig through the technical obstacles in the way is somehow A Bad Thing -- is entirely tenable.
The tenor of discourse on the net has trended *steadily* down over those three decades, IME, and I'm not at all convinced that making it easier to contribute to WP is in fact the panacea that all the proponents of this stuff say it is.
Go. :-)
Cheers, -- jra