Wikitext in the wild

Created 4/6/2009, updated 5/18/20171 minute read

I’ve never really known how many people use my wikitext extension, but today I got my first ever feature request for it! (If you’re curious, you can check out the request in ticket #1268.)

So I have a user!

My curiosity was piqued. I decided to hit Google and see if I could find any other evidence of use.

Sightings in the wild

At this stage I’ve managed to stumble across three sightings:

First up I found Hoboken by Jeffrey Chupp; it’s a simple wiki built using Sinatra that requires wikitext
There’s also the ActsAsMarkup project, an ActiveRecord plug-in by Brian Landau that supports wikitext as one of the possible markup formats
Finally, I found this GitHub fork by Stephen Judkins, which currently has 5 followers (including me and the original forker, the "mother forker" if you will)

It’s that last one which had me most surprised, because you can see there’s a guy by the name of BJ Clark that actually took the time to understand the parser (about 2,500 lines of C) and produce this commit.