[cetacea]

If Markdown were around (and widely used) when MediaWiki was written, I imagine there would have been a push to use it as the markup language for MediaWiki.

I don't see MediaWiki markup as byzantine or archaic, except for whatever half-assed LaTeX processor they use. It seems to only recognize some random subset of features from various ams packages. Why they don't just use a fully-featured TeX distro is beyond me.

Wikipedia's talk page workflow (indenting to start a new comment, then inserting a special image to wrap around to the margin once too many indents have accumulated) is moronic.