Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/What about all the nice things Wikitext offers us? Will they be available in Flow?/reply (16)

Totally; a lot of forums have that sort of markup (phpBB comes to mind). But there are several crucial differences.
 * 1) First: while it is a common feature of a lot of forums, it's not a mandatory feature. It's perfectly fine to get along with posting without it (and a lot of people do!) Markup on Wikimedia sites, including on talkpages, is pretty much mandatory; there is very little you can do without some element of wikimarkup, be it section headings or signings.
 * 2) Second: one of the reasons that the markup is, as you say, simple, is because there's a lot of things that forums handle that talkpages don't. If I want to post something on a forum, I post it; that's it. If I want to post it on a talkpage? Well, if I want a new section, I need headers and signatures. Not a particularly big deal. If I want to reply to an existing section, I need to know the various forms of indentation, properly scope how far I need to indent, signatures. If I want to do anything complex - anything 'meta'pedian, involving participation in the core workflows, I need indentation, scoping of indentation, signatures, links - and it only gets more complex from there. Closing requires template syntax, outdenting when something has indented too far requires template syntax, there are various different forms of indentation depending on how I want things to display, and so on and so forth. The fact that a lot of people can handle phpBB indicates nothing about wikimarkup; wikimarkup and what we expect users to handle is far more complex. We're comparing apples to oranges.