Wikitext

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Wikitext is a wiki markup language for creating documents. The current version is explained in Help:Editing (see also Help:Formatting and Markup spec/DTD ). Wikitext features a mixture of content, markup, macros, and metadata. The content of current and previous revisions of a wiki page is in the database in the text table, generally in the form of wikitext, although some types of pages, such as Wikidata objects, are stored in other content formats.

User documentation

Developer documentation

Specs/wikitext/1.0.0 – as of August 2016, the URI used by Parsoid to identify the version of Wikitext it is assuming

Implementation

PHP Parser – Generated documentation from comments embedded in the source code. A summary of what the PHP parser is as described on that page: "Processes wiki markup (which uses a more user-friendly syntax, such as "[[Link]]" for making links), and provides a one-way transformation of that wiki markup it into (X)HTML output / markup (which in turn the browser understands, and can display)."
Parsoid – translation tool for MediaWiki which translates between HTML5 DOM with RDFa and MediaWiki Wikitext.

Testing

We have provided important compatibility information, which helps describe expected behavior for converting wikitext to HTML.

Parser tests - Our tests in MediaWiki core contain the authoritative source for Wikitext markup compatibility testing.
Parsoid test cases (parserTests.txt on Diffusion) – a forked version of the MediaWiki core tests, used by Parsoid. Besides the wt2html mode that the PHP parser supports, Parsoid's parser tests runner also enables several other testing modes not supported by the PHP parser (wt2wt, html2wt, html2html, randomized edits for testing selective serialization, manual edits for controlled testing of serialization). These tests are manually synchronized using scripts in the Parsoid codebase.

Discussions from 2015 and later

Architecture focus 2015 – 2015 discussion at Lyon Hackathon about the future of MediaWiki, including content representation and transclusion
Requests for comment/A Spec For Wikitext – RFC which defines a framework for writing a Wikitext spec, should we choose to write one (discussed in Phab:E259 in August 2016)
Handling wiki content beyond plaintext – Discussions planned to occur at WikiDev17

Discussions prior to 2015

Markup spec – early attempt to use a standard metasyntax (such as Backus–Naur Form) to define MediaWiki Wikitext.
Parser 2011 – early Parsoid documentation, including a 2011 plan for rolling out a new version.
Wikitext standard – Page that was active in 2003-2005
Wikitext/2003 syntax – Quoting the page: I'm just tipping some links onto this page for -- I will clean it up to some sort of coherence later -- Tarquin 16:45, 30 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Wikitext.next – Brion VIBBER's thoughts from 2011