Which Wiki text syntax or Markdown to use?

syntax wiki markdown knowledge-management
Peter Kofler picture Peter Kofler · Jan 11, 2011 · Viewed 15.1k times · Source

Working on my personal knowledge base... I want to format my documents, even on local hard disk in wiki syntax. Sometimes I would upload them to a (corporate) wiki, sometimes I would download them from there. Planned are some tools to support this flow and searching my knowledge base (documents) for later. Obviously I want the markdown to be compatible with most, minimising conversion work.

So my question is similar to this related question, but

  • What wiki text version or Markdown (dialect) should I use when I start something new? (i.e. documentation project and kind of wiki).
  • What are the most wiedely used/recognized ones?
  • And where is tool support (editors and or libraries) best? Concerned prog. languages are Java, Ruby, Scala.

Answer

Peter Kofler picture Peter Kofler · Mar 12, 2012

Wikipedia says that there is no commonly accepted standard wikitext language.

Creole is one effort for a "common wiki markup language to be used across different Wikis". There is a version 1.0 of the specification and several wikis and wiki engines implement it. MediaWiki does not implement it.

Markdown has a large number of implementations and seems to be used quite a lot.

As there is no agreed standard, the language might be selected depending on features and available implementations depending on the use case.

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