An actual wiki in Drupal

Hey all,

I come from a wiki development background. have been involved in wiki communities and circles for a while now.

I have struggled with both Liquid and Wikitools in Drupal since Drupal 4.7, and have come to the conclusion that the problem is with Freelinking.

When I first used freelinking, I loved it. But, as I tried to customize and add functionality onto wiki in Drupal, Freelinking, and specifically the way that Freelinking makes links, has become a real bane to me in constructing wiki in Drupal.

If you feel the same as me, then what I am proposing here is a new way to make links specifically for wiki in Drupal. This way of making links would work with a wiki content-type (or content type of your choosing). Would work with Drupal's search system

I am thinking of something kind of like what is described here: http://drupal.org/node/156523 and in this patch http://drupal.org/files/issues/proper_links_0.patch but basically goes further into being more like the guts of actual wiki parsers (creating direct links to nodes that are run through regular expression filters, etc) basically, creating an actual parser, and one that can work with WYSIWYG editors (in my case FCKeditor).

I have someone asking me to make this already, so no matter what looks like it will come into existince. But, I thought I'd share this proposed (albeit somewhat vague at this point) direction for feedback from those interested.

Would it really be that bad to have an actual wiki parser for Drupal? Or, is it enough to simply have the patch that allows freelinking to point straight to nodes, given that the whole linking scheme works better in Drupal through Input Filters? What do you think?