[WhitneyLand]

tldr; - Think of Wikipedia. Even though it’s a web site with html, people who make edits do not create html. Instead they edit this nasty quasi-text document bearing a vague resemblance to markdown. This seems to be intended for a similar purpose in wikis.

post tldr - The terrible thing was this was painful to use and early on wikis had almost no structured data. So you have incredible amounts of useful information that mostly cannot be leveraged or processed efficiently because it’s a living nightmare to parse.

Over time things have improved. They added a wysiwyg editor so you don’t have to look at it. They’ve incrementally added ways to allow for documents and data to be more structured and parsable.

Not sure how far along everything is at present.

[cift]

I see. Would be nice if there was some kind of about page explaining this