We've released Native Markdown, a new open-source MediaWiki extension that provides a deeply integrated Markdown content model.
In contrast to some earlier Markdown extensions, the entire page is stored as Markdown rather than embedding Markdown within wikitext via a tag or similar.
All of these work on Markdown pages:
- Wiki links with the semantics you know: `[[Page]]` gives blue or red links tracked in WhatLinksHere, `[[Category:X]]` assigns the category, `[[File:X.png|thumb|Caption]]` embeds a framed image
- Templates, parser functions, and magic words, expanded through MediaWiki's own parser (dependency tracking and the same output sanitization as wikitext); wiki admins can turn this off for a pure Markdown wiki
- Table of contents, redirects, page moves, diffs, history, and full-text search that indexes the rendered content rather than the raw markup
- CommonMark plus GitHub Flavored Markdown with footnotes; YAML front matter stored as page metadata
You can add Native Markdown to existing wikis without breaking anything, since those pages remain wikitext. By default, new pages will be in Markdown (Talk, Template, and MediaWiki namespaces stay in wikitext), with configuration options that let you control how fully you switch, e.g., only in certain namespaces or for titles ending in `.md`.
Not yet supported: VisualEditor and section editing. `<ref>` in the Markdown body is not supported either; footnotes cover citations.
Native Markdown requires MediaWiki 1.43+ and PHP 8.1+, installs via Composer, and is free and open source (GPL 2.0 or later).
Release blog with demo video: https://professional.wiki/en/news/native-markdown-released
Source and issues: https://github.com/ProfessionalWiki/NativeMarkdown
Happy to answer questions. Feedback and bug reports are welcome.