We had several discussions on the defaults for WikiText Markdown, in particular the question of “two spaces at end of line” linebreaks (standard Markdown) vs automatic return-based linebreaks (Github-flavored Markdown).

There are arguments to both sides:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26011/should-the-markdown-renderer-treat-a-single-line-break-as-br
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/10/markdown-one-year-later
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/10/23/github-flavored-markdown
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p

However, the standard Markdown “two spaces at end of line” linebreaks seems to be more commonly used in practice. For example: stackoverflow and the stackexchange sites, and also Github uses it for .md files in the repository, and only Github-flavored Markdown in messages, issues, and comments (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18019957/where-is-github-flavored-markdown-gfm-actually-used-in-github). We will stick to the standard Markdown “two spaces at end of line” linebreaks as default to have a guideline for the implementation. Because automatic return-based linebreaks can also be preferred in some applications, there should be a mechanism to switch away from the default as well.

Submitted by Danny Groenewegen on 4 September 2014 at 17:56

wikitext-hardwraps=true|false added as application.ini option, default is false.