When comparing Markdown vs MediaWiki, the Slant community recommends Markdown for most people. In the question“What are the best markup languages?” Markdown is ranked 2nd while MediaWiki is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Markdown is:
Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Human-readable
Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form.
Pro Widely used
Markdown is quickly becoming the writing standard for academics, scientists, writers, and many more. Websites like GitHub and reddit use Markdown to style their comments.
Pro De facto standard
Markdown is ubiquitous. It's supported by nearly everything. The markup available in the common subset of all the many dialects isn't that rich, but it's usually enough to get the job done.
Pro Multi-directional
You can convert HTML to Markdown or Markdown to HTML. You can use tools like pandoc to convert to other formats as well.
Pro Revision friendly
It is easy to track changes for markdown documents as compared to other formats like doc, html, etc. You only need to place your markdown documents under some version control system.
Pro The de facto standard
Mediawiki is a widely used wiki engine. It is used to power Wikipedia and thus most people will be more comfortable/accustomed to using MediaWiki.
Pro It has a powerful templating system
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under GPL.
Pro Version control
MediaWiki allows viewing past revisions of pages.
Pro It has a usable WYSIWYG editor
Pro Thanks to Wikipedia it is thoroughly documented
Pro Runs on any PHP server
It requires a webserver running PHP 5.2 or later of any kind.
Pro Great multilingual support
MediaWiki has full support for over 65 languages and partial support for over 300.
Pro Multiple database support
MediaWiki can store data in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQLite databases.
Cons
Con Lacks a coherent standard
Lacks a coherent standard, just many semi-compatible dialects (MultiMarkdown, etc). This inconsistency can cause problems if the person writing the Markdown is using a different dialect from the one that will be used to render it.
Con Bad support for table
It has poor support for table, while table is an important part of article.
Con Bad support for larger documents
Works good for single file documents like READMEs.
Lack support for cross-references, TOCs, document index etc.
Con It doesn't support semantic markup
It's unstructured.
Con Access control requires an extension
There is no built-in access control, but you can download an extension for ACL.
