Jira allows fields to be rendered either with a Default Text Renderer or a rich-text renderer (the Atlassian Wiki Renderer). Info here: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v3.12/configurerenderers.html
Some Apache projects have the rich text renderer enabled; see for example: https://issues.apache.org/activemq/browse/AMQCPP-186 Eddie was trying to block quote another person's comment, and it wasn't working, so I asked infra if they could enable this for our project, because I didn't have enough karma to do this. Jukka Zitting did it. I realize now that I should have asked our community of developers if they preferred this capability or not. I prefer having a richer markup for description and comment fields in Jira (those were the only ones affected). In any case, its use is optional. The markup, if you wish to use it, is the same as for our wiki. The markup capabilities are described here: http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/WikiRendererHelpAction.jspa?section=all -Marshall
