David Wheeler says
Lately I’ve been fiddling a bit with Markdown, John Gruber’s minimalist plain text markup syntax. I’ve become more and more attracted to Markdown after I’ve had to spend some time using Trac and, to a lesser degree, TWiki and MediaWiki. The plain-text markup syntax in these projects is…how shall I put this?… god-awful
This is a big part of the reason why we chose Markdown along with Textile as the supported Wiki markup languages for MojoMojo. Having edited some wikipedia-pages, as well as Trac , while we were using that for the catalyst dev wiki, I totally agree. Their markup language makes me want to hurl.