WWW - the Wonderful World of Wikis

The world of the wiki has always been very strange to me. Other than having referred to Wikipedia (after all it does tend to appear in the top 5 results when googling) for some general information or definition on a vague topic I have never quite understood them.

I generally find them hard to navigate - I guess I show just how old school I am, preferring to use navigation to relying on a search (which often yield nothing useful) and am extremely surprised to discover that they use their own mark-up language! What is with that? They might say that it is supposed to be easier than HTML and blah blah blah BUT I don't get why (a) you'd want to develop and introduce a new language (I mean HTML wasn't that difficult) and (b) why not just create the software with a WYSIWYG editor???

So to broaden my knowledge I decided to do some reading on the subject. Can you believe that some organisations have decided to go with wiki's in place of a CMS to structure, edit and store online information for reference and collaboration? To me that just seems insane. I can understand wanting to use a wiki as a beginning to storing basic knowledge and IP but as the main method for cataloguing all of this, along with documents and other references I find hard to envisage.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying there could never be such an application for them, it's just that I struggle to understand them and exactly how the work and the benefits they provide given my (very) limited knowledge of them. I have considered researching them further for my second WEB101 assignment to help me understand them more and other possible applications, but am not sure if it will result in a less than desirable score on my paper.