Using Markdown instead of RST for the README

[pmatulis]

GitHub, where this project lives and where the documentation it supports lives, does not have good support for RST. Markdown is the de facto standard on GitHub for the publication of text. Should we convert our README to Markdown? In issue #96 I'm advocating for another file too.

[lblythen]

I'd support that. README.md is accessible from the toctree of a project that's otherwise all-reST, so NP.

[ru-fu]

Hmm, no strong opinion either way from me. I agree that it's better for GitHub, and that it's a convention to have a README.md.
However, it might seem confusing to have Markdown files in a starter pack for RST documentation, especially if it's more than one, and it will make it trickier to run the automatic checks (since we then need to run them on both .md and .rst).

[pmatulis]

As of now, we are keeping the README in RST format as it aids in testing that the changes merged into the repo work as needed. We should replace this quasi testing with an actual QA test site that could be placed into a qa directory. Once that's done, we should convert the README to Markdown.