Cooperation is keen

A bunch of Markdown extensions do exist, but they just don’t seem to capture the extent of features you need to really feel like a wiki page. Markdown is narrow in the scope of syntax it wants to work with - if you want an image to be right-floated, you’re using HTML for that. That’s a downgrade from MediaWiki image syntax.

I run a large MW myself, and earlier this year helped someone to set up a new wiki. They wrote the first article in Markdown, thousands of words, then went to paste it onto their new wiki, where they quickly learned MediaWiki isn’t Markdown. They then went down the path of trying Markdown extensions, then tried converting to wikitext with pandoc, then finally decided to just convert by hand.

Unfortunately some extensions like VisualEditor are also very tied to the wikitext parser, and can’t be adapted to handle Markdown easily. The situation with syntax just isn’t great, but I guess Wikimedia is more concerned with maintaining the millions of articles that already exist in their wikis.