I just added this issue to IFDB’s github:
Wanted to note this here because I think that addition would be a major site improvement, but I have no idea how easy or difficult it would be to implement. So I figured some general discussion might be helpful, and/or might spur people who know more about website coding than me into action to make it happen!
It would be helpful. On the other hand, I feel like the ifwiki’s actual article formatting needs (separate from the technical methods of making them happen) are reasonably demanding. Maybe any wiki’s are. I know my own experience was that having to grapple with the editor was my way of grappling with the formats, too, so that I could learn to edit the pages.
It is probably more important to make people feel like they could edit the pages in the first place. I can imagine a side-effect of more new-folks pages needing attention or cleanup; I know my early efforts were cleaned up by others. This is probably low danger, low incidence, but just thinking aloud.
-Wade
I think the original post always about ifdb and not ifwiki, but there might be a connection between the page design of the two that I didn’t think of.
I like the rich text editor idea! I don’t know how to do it but it seems smart.
Oh yeah! I probably just saw ifwiki because my brain knows that’s the hard one.
-Wade
What format does IFDB use for text? (Pause to dig around…) It’s this link: Formatting Hints
We’re working on making IFWiki easier, but I don’t want to derail the topic any further 
Still thinking about this… Even just supporting markdown would be a big improvement. Imagine being able to include a link by writing [text](url) instead of <a href="url">text</a>!
Yes, I would personally love a Markdown editor even more than a rich-text one. Custom-made rich-text editors on web pages often get frustrating in what they support and don’t support; I prefer plain text that I can mark up as desired.
I think my ideal would be markdown with some gui options for easy clicks. What we have here is pretty good, for instance. (I’m just talking about the interface; I’m not suggesting IFDB take on footnote support and the like)
Just as a general comment, we often ask how to get people into IF. I don’t think game recommendations need be the first answer. It’s about accessible tools, too.
I made a pull request, just for the markdown part.
Thanks so much, @pieartsy! Look what we’ve done:
IFDB reviews now allow you to use Markdown. Now you can type
*emphasis*and get italic text,**strong**and get bold text, use backticks`to get monospaced code. Also numbered lists, bulleted lists, blockquotes, headings, and the whole jam. See "Review Formatting Hints" for details.Additional details:
- Right now, Markdown is only available in reviews. It will require additional work to add Markdown to each text box in the site, e.g. comments, game descriptions, etc.
- In order to avoid messing up existing reviews, we only render Markdown in reviews that have been modified since today's date, August 30. This means that if you edit a review and save it, it might look different than when you started editing it. But we did a bunch of tests and found that 90%+ of reviews aren’t transformed at all by adding Markdown support, and more than half of the remainder are improved by it (e.g. converting “*emphasis*” to “emphasis”). If Markdown is doing something you don't want it to do, try using a backslash
\character before asterisks, underscores, etc.
Excellent – thanks for plowing through this. I know there was a lot of iteration.
