A suggested requirement for a living knowledge commons wiki
Editing wikis is too often compromised by the difficulty or inaccessibility of the editing process. Too many wikis have their own (different) lightweight markup language.
The whole point about a wiki is that it can be edited by several people. If it is set up so that only one group of people can edit it easily – say those who are above average in their technical competence – then it is going to compromise the wiki's usability.
Most wikis work with a lightweight markup language (LML), but annoyingly, several of these differ from each other in minor ways. Perhaps one ideal is to have a WYSIWYG interface, this can also be annoying for the input of, e.g., links, or anything other than plain text. Different wikis have their own varied approaches to allowing WYSIWYG editing or not.
It would be really nice if all wikis allowed editing in one LML, and an obvious choice would be Markdown — except that this itself comes in different flavours. I would really like to see a new version of Markdown that is explicitly able to encode the semantics of links, and also allows for namespacing, along with explicit conventions for encoding metadata that is not displayed.
Note (2025-08-04) I really like the look of https://hackmd.io/@sparna/semantic-markdown-draft
A few services, including HackMD have the capability to edit LML while seeing a rendered version at the same time. This seems to me to be a great way of getting the advantages of a LML and of WYSIWYG at the same time. If the wiki editor could do this, it would be great — maybe even, at best, allowing editing both of the LML panel and the WYSIWYG panel, though I imagine that would be very challenging to implement.
Could the HackMD functionality be merged somehow into a fully-fledged wiki?