UPDATE: May 2013

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Since this page was published back in November 2011 there have been two plugins released on the Atlassian Marketplace that provide source and wiki markup editing capabilities in Confluence 4.x.

Source Editor for Confluence 4.x

Compatible with Confluence 4.1.5 and above, the Confluence Source Editor is a free plugin, developed and supported by Atlassian, that allows users to view and edit the underlying storage format for a Confluence page.

Wiki Plugin for Confluence

Bob Swift’s Wiki Plugin for Confluence 4.0 and above allows entry and editing of wiki markup inside a wiki-markup macro in Confluence pages.

In September 2011 we released Confluence 4.0. Underpinning the new functionality it included was a change to the way Confluence stored its pages, moving from wiki markup to a higher fidelity storage format. You can read more about this decision here – Why We Removed the Wiki Markup Editor in Confluence 4.0.

For the overwhelming majority of customers, this was a huge, huge win. An end to the inherent problems of having two editors and the ability for us to deliver features people had long asked for. We did our best to make wiki markup gurus comfortable as well, with a number of features designed to make the new editor faster than wiki markup:

  • Autoformatting of Wiki Markup
  • Autocomplete for Links, Media, and Macros
     
  • Autoconvert for Pasted Links
     

For a small number of users though, this never mattered – like users working within a small, purely technical team who don't:

  • collaborate with other less technical teams like marketing, sales and product management
  • require dedicated vendor support
  • rely upon the various add-ons available on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange
  • need a wiki that provides structure through page hierarchies
  • require enterprise-grade security, permissions and native LDAP integration
  • need deep JIRA integration

We hate losing customers – it upsets us. We still think we make the best enterprise wiki available today, but if wiki markup syntax is generally more useful to you than Confluence's extensive set of add-ons, structured page hierarchies, robust security and permissions, JIRA integration, and an editor anyone can use, we genuinely think you should try an alternative.

In the spirit of being an open company, here's a list of the more popular wikis that provide a markup editor. 

Wikipedia has a more exhaustive list here. Feel free to comment on this page if you know of other solutions.