New Wiki: WikiText, or MarkDown?

So, we've got the new wiki set up here: http://wiki.diaspora-project.org

I'm in the process of moving all of the wiki docs over, but I figure now would be a time to ask an important question: Do we keep the Markdown formatting and use a MediaWiki extension to process it, or do we just go native and use WikiText?

I do see benefits to both. Personally, I really like Markdown due to its simplicity compared to WikiText, but if we're using MediaWiki, and everyone's expectations are for the formatting to match the software, I won't object to using WikiText. It's just that right now, we have a fair amount of docs that I'm in the process of converting over to WikiText at the moment, which is somewhat tedious. Deciding on which format to use will set a precedent for what we do in the future with the formatting of our docs.

The extension can be found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MarkdownSyntax

I do really like Markdown but using it in a MediaWiki does seem kind of weird and indeed unexpected. I'd say lets go with WikiText.

OT: Before we start linking to them please enable URL rewriting to do the classical /wiki/Page_Title URLs, that index.php?title= ones just look awful :P

Btw http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/index.html might be useful for a start.

I do like MediaWiki markup better, since it was the thing I used most before I started with github/rails.
Especially, what some of the parser extensions and templates can do ;)

+1 for MW syntax , according to expectations. Do you use pandoc to convert ?
+1 for nice urls
Glad to see a true wiki online!

Never used pandoc, just stumbled upon it.

Yeah, I'm converting through pandoc at the moment. It seems to work well!

I'll work on getting clean URLs up and running today, too.

Don't have enough experience of either to have a preference (have used Markdown on Diaspora but not elsewhere, and have created and edited Wikipedia pages - not sure if they use the same WikiText standard?). Am happy to learn whatever language you experts decide on, as long as it's a well known standard that a lot of people will know - as I'm sure both of those are.

Sorry, have just re-read Sean's original message, and I think it would make sense to put in extra work now to convert existing docs the native format of MediaWiki, if that is the platform we'll be using in the future. In my experience, in a growing project, if you take an early decision to move to a new platform, it's worth the extra effort to make everything consistent with that platform to make things easier in the future, which will save a lot more work than that taken to set things up properly now.

So, if people are happy that WikiText is a good standard to use, and it's native to MediaWiki, I'd vote for using that.

Sean, if I can be of help in converting some existing docs, let me know.