As @Vojtěch Dostál pointed out in the CommonMark thread, this discussion was highlighted in this week's Tech News. (and welcome to this RFC discussion!). It is intended for a pretty technical audience as we talk about development strategy for what is possible or feasible.
@Vojtěch Dostál - what was about the Tech News entry intrigued you? I'd like to understand your perspective as a test case for what perspective an improved intro would be helpful.
I like to keep myself in touch with all the news happening in the Wiki world because it helps me to sort out priorities of Wikimedia Czech Republic in long-term. I guess at first I did not understand a word from the Tech News entry so I clicked. It seems that this has something to do with the editing interface, or the way that Wikimarkup is used in mediawiki, which if of course intriguing because these things affect editor recruitment and retention.
As I understand it, this is about adding markdown syntax support to MediaWiki, but not using it for Wikimedia except maybe some very specific cases.
While the RFC page talks about Markdown being a first-class-citizen in MediaWiki, it also says that it would not be a replacement for Wikitext as used by Wikimedia, so I think "first-class-citizen" is a bit misleading. If it isnt deployed and used on Wikimedia projects, it isnt a first-class-citizen in MediaWiki.
markdown is a growing text markup format, but it is still quite immature, and its focus is on very simple and readable markup, not mass collaboration and complex pages, and most implementations have no concept of embedded content other than images (i.e. no templates).
There are some wikis which would benefit from using Markdown instead of Mediawiki's flavour of wikitext, but not Wikimedia projects.
There could be some Wikimedia workflows which might benefit from Markdown, e.g. the authoring of the first revision of a page, the author might prefer to use it as a syntax they are more accustomed to, or because they are copying from somewhere else.
