Wikimedia Developer Summit/2017/Handling wiki content beyond plaintext

This a main topic discussed at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017, facilitated by Rob Lanphier (RobLa-WMF) and Daniel Kinzler (WMDE), other people who volunteered in E285, possibly other volunteers.

The problem
The power of wikitext and the popularity of Wikipedia has created a difficult problem. Wikis were originally designed to reduce complexity. As Ward Cunningham noted in a 1995 email explaining his early wiki software, he pointed out that his new website editing software "has a forms-based authoring capability that doesn't require familiarity with html".[1]

Over the years, MediaWiki has grown more complex, supporting many complicated features in MediaWiki's Wikitext. The complexity has helped the Wikimedia movement build many projects of global importance. That complexity has made our sites more difficult to edit, and is possibly a factor limiting the growth of our editing community. Contributing to popular websites in 2016 is a lot less challenging than it was in 1995 when Ward Cunningham created the first wiki. Wikipedia has been a powerful demonstration of building a knowledge collection via participatory media (also known as "user-generated content"), but is not the only repository of knowledge (even on the Wikimedia sites).

Proposals welcome
One recommendation coming from the 2016_Strategy/Recommendations: "Create different UIs, features, and levels of support for different levels of engagement (EWP) to better overcome the steep learning curve". What should the Wikimedia development community do in the next couple of years to make it easier for every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge? For proposals you'd like someone else to lead, please ask them on the talk page.
 * T147604 - Cross-functional support for rich media
 * T142803 - Requests for comment/A Spec For Wikitext
 * (place your proposal here)

Learn more

 * I Dream of Content vision paper


 * FIXME: useful links.