There was a consensus at the wikisim 06 to use dashes for unnumbered lists because otherwise it would be confusing with the markup for bold (**x**). As far as i can remember all but Chuck and Me voted for dashes. We voted against it because the asterisk is simply used by almost all wiki engines for this. Eugene pointed out that he used dashes before there was the markup and as far as I remember I did that in simple text files as well. One has just to look in old readme.txt files. You often find dashes for unnumbered list there. Since I think **x** are the best markup for bold, I would go for dashes as well now.

Dashes interfere with the syntax for [Lines], but i think lines are not that important anyway. If we leave out lines in creole or find an other syntax for it i would not mind.

Option one with *
{{{
== Option 1

This is a **bold** text

* element 1
* element 2
* ** this is a bold text element 3**
** this is a second level element
}}}

Option two with dash -
{{{
== Option 2

This is a **bold** text

- element 1
- element 2
- ** this is a bold text element 3**
-- this is a second level element
}}}
--[Christoph] 28-Aug-06

There is a somewhat weird behavior of some web browsers (so far tested it only on the Gecko-based ones) that convert first-level bullets to some characters when copied as text. So far I've seen '*' and '#' used, and I'm not sure what it depends on. I know it might not be very important.

As for conflicts with bold and hr, I think the hr conflict can be resolved easier:

{{{
** is this text bold
** or are these just two second-level list items
}}}

{{{
---- This is a fourth-level list item
----
This is a horizontal rule. It must be alone on a line.
}}}
Also note that 4th-level list items are going to be rather rare...

One problem with dashes for bullets is for lists of numbers:
{{{
- 10
- 15
- -32
}}}

Are those number positive or negative? This can be confusing.
I know that http://www.yaml.org/ also uses dashes for lists, maybe we could learn from their experiences?

-- RadomirDopieralski 2006-08-30