(In reply to comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > With wikitext, it's sort of all or nothing; it would be a huge pain to
> > disallow all wikitext except, say, italics. Of course, if anybody out there
> > thinks it's easy, patches welcome ;)
> 
> This bug tracker keeps bugs open if patches are welcome. We'll just adjust
> the
> importance/priority to lowest/enhancement, I suppose.
> 
> For what it's worth, we implement partial parsers in weird places. Consider
> edit summaries, which auto-link internal links, but don't auto-link external
> links and magic links and don't allow formatting such as bold or italics. Not
> that we really should continue this practice of creating new partial
> parsers...
> but it's certainly not unprecedented.
> 
> > Since this is just the MVP, I think it makes sense to keep things simple for
> > now and just keep titles in plaintext.
> 
> The most valuable player? Sorry, I don't know what "MVP" means.
> 
"Minimum viable product". Basically it's designed to be just complete enough that we can show it off without it falling over. An example would be Page Curation, where we deployed in a really, really unfinished form and then developed where people could see it.

(actually, page curation is not the best example since it broke blocking for ~20 minutes, somehow. But.)

Title linking may (heck, probably will) be necessary for the finished thing, but it's not necessary for the "demo model"; while it'd be nice to have, I would rather we made the features we do have work.

> > If there's a demonstrable need to have wikitext in titles that outweighs all
> > the cons, it's something we can easily change.
> 
> Having watched the train wreck that was VisualEditor's deployment, I can that
> it's often small 'features' like this that can potentially be a very big deal
> to a wiki and its workflows. If you look at a process such as [[WP:RFPP]],
> you
> can see a half-dozen links in many headers, each of which correspond to
> discrete units of work. I think attempting to de-wikify the topic title may
> result in a lot of annoyed users.

I agree it'll be a big deal, but this is the MVP; if there's a need, we can build it into the next release.