We have listed many different list markup alternatives, but there are so many there that it is difficult to discuss. So, I have taken the liberty to narrow it down to the most likely best two choices which we can discuss more easily: asterisk (*) or hyphen (-).

Asterisk

Space required only after a bullet followed immediately by bold text.

Advantages

• used by most wiki engines
• if you save a Microsoft Word document as text it uses asterisk as the bullet character
• very rare in prose text

Disadvantages

• conflict with bold
• difficult to read when list items start with bold text

Hyphen

This was proposed unanimously at the WikiSym workshop with only Christoph Sauer and Chuck Smith opposing it, due to making asterisks backwards-compatible with current wiki syntaxes. However, they have both agreed that they believe this was a mistake due to the asterisks conflict and want to use hyphen.

Advantages

• used primarily for lists before wikis
• easier to read when list items start with bold text

Disadvantages

• not as backwards-compatible with wikis in general
• awkward when used with the repeat-bullets-to-nest-list pattern
• extremely common in prose text - at least when considering wikis that allow hard line breaks within paragraphs.

Also see:

• Hyphen List Markup Proposal
• Require Space After Bullet Proposal