Since the last release "Mort", dokuwiki supports markdown natively in addition to the old syntax. This can be activated in the settings (incl. a combination of both).

I think this is a great step for dokuwiki. Markdown is the modern syntax for simple text based documents. This allows people to write dokuwiki pages without learning the old syntax (assuming most people already know markdown). Also a possible migration to or from dokuwiki gets way easier. But it also comes at a cost. There is a mode where dokuwiki allows both syntax in the same document. this leads do documents that are neither complete markdown nor complete dokuwiki and thus completely locked into dokuwiki.