And we'd also need to *fix* all pages with this
syntax, and we can't really fix automatically, need to check on a case-by-case basis.
Why not? The current parser manages just fine with it, you could write
a bot that changes everything with the same rule.
The proposed change is just that ''' always opens a bold tag and ''
always opens an italic tag, not having to check *the entire wikitext*
for context (as is done currently) would make things a lot easier, not
just for machines but for people to, the only way to tell currently if
''' is really opening a whole lot of bold text or just opening some
italic text is to find the matching '' or ''', that's not
intuitive at
all.