Because it's fun, educational, and social all in one! Besides, you can correct other people on the spot without asking their permission!

Agreed - wikis are wayyyyy cool. They even allow for some basic formatting -- RaviDesai

Wiki Formatting:

But why they do not simply use html? --NormanWerner

They do use some html, but not all of it. One reason is for simplicity when typing--for instance this text is indented because I typed a : character at the start of the line. In order to do that in HTML, I would have to type much more. The wiki syntax also prevents many common errors, like not closing a bold-tag and making all the following text be bold.

Another reason for not using raw html is security--several old versions of popular browsers have security problems that can be triggered by arbitrary "malicious HTML". Even without considering security, malicious users could do things like Javascript popup windows or page redirects if they had full HTML ability. Several "experimental" sites that allowed full-HTML editing have suffered such attacks, including a couple other wikis that allowed arbitrary HTML.

There is a "raw-HTML" option in the wiki code, but it is defaulted to "off" for the public release. I strongly recommend leaving it off for public wikis. (If that option was enabled, you could type "<html>

Header

</html>" to create a header.) See the Meatball Wiki RawHtmlWiki page for earlier discussion of these issues.

The HTML tags directly supported in the current version are i, b, tt, and pre. There is also a pseudo-tag "nowiki" which you can use to prevent the wiki from formatting your text (like NotALink--edit to see the tags). The next release will add a code tag (like tt, but also suppresses wiki formatting) and a new wiki-syntax for h1-h6 (h1 is =text=, h2 is ==text==, etc...). I might also add em and strong tags to the next release--there are only a few people who seem to like them, but they really like them.

The WikiPedia may have different needs than the typical wiki. The formatting rules are easy to change, and I am willing to try new things for this wiki if the maintainers of this site want changes. --CliffordAdams