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add explanation about markdown choice.
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fiatjaf committed Sep 18, 2023
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Expand Up @@ -45,3 +45,10 @@ As there could be many articles for each given name, some kind of prioritization
### Wiki-related contact lists

[NIP-51](51.md) lists can also be used to create a list of users that are trusted only in the context of wiki authorship or wiki curationship.

Why Markdown?
-------------

If the idea is to make a wiki then the most obvious text format to use is probably the mediawiki/wikitext format used by Wikipedia since it's widely deployed in all mediawiki installations and used for decades with great success. However, it turns out that format is very bloated and convoluted, has way too many features and probably because of that it doesn't have many alternative implementations out there, and the ones that exist are not complete and don't look very trustworthy. Also it is very much a centralized format that can probably be changed at the whims of the Wikipedia owners.

On the other hand, Markdown has proven to work well for small scale wikis and one of the biggest wikis in the planet (which is not very often thought of as a wiki), [StackOverflow](https://stackoverflow.com) and its child sites, and also one of the biggest "personal wiki" software, [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/). Markdown can probably deliver 95% of the functionality of wikitext. When augmented with tables, diagram generators and MathJax (which are common extensions that exist in the wild and can be included in this NIP) that rate probably goes to 99%, and its simplicity is a huge benefit that can't be overlooked. Wikitext format can also be transpíled into Markdown using Pandoc. Given all that, I think it's a reasonable suspicion that mediawiki is not inherently better than Markdown, the success of Wikipedia probably cannot be predicated on the syntax language choice.

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