IMHO this would be by far the most important change (in a positive sense) to this website since I'm a perlmonk.

I have used up many hours on perlmonks, learned a lot but also wasted quite a few hours. The wasted hours were on account of typing all that <p> markup and having to read all the unformatted and unreadable questions of anonmonks and posting something like "Please use p- and c-tags...".

And yes, I don't believe it is the fault of lazy (anon)monks that so many don't use the markup. A big reason ist that the information comes after the input box. And gives a lot of information and links, but never directly talks about just the two tags needed for 99% of all nodes by new users (i.e. the code tag is only mentioned indirectly as something to use if you wanted pre-tags. My knowledge of HTML is from a time when I used <verbatim> for code, didn't even know pre-tags).

Even if we subscripe to the 'lazy' argument, that lazyness also hurts the readers of a node, not only the writer.

In other words, mighty ++ for these changes.