The Pandoc User Guide defines a Block Quotation as a block
"with each line preceded by a > character and a space. (The > need not start at the left margin, but it should not be indented more than three spaces.)"

However, pandoc will block quote any of these

#Heading

text

| indented address

although the following correctly requires 1+4=5 spaces preceding the verbatim \text\

verbatim \text\

The results are confusing. Could Block Quotations be consistently indicated by > followed by a space, so the first three examples are not block quoted?

@miltonrg, your sample:

    #Heading

    text

    | indented address

    verbatim \text\

outputs the following HTML code (with latest stable release):

<pre><code>#Heading

text

| indented address

verbatim \text\</code></pre>

ERm, I didn't realise the bug tracker was in markdown, so it has formatted my typing on send, kind of proving my point. What I typed was >#Heading, for example. Guess I'd better verbatim the examples. Here goes...

The Pandoc User Guide defines a Block Quotation as a block
"with each line preceded by a > character and a space. (The > need not start at the left margin, but it should not be indented more than three spaces.)"

However, pandoc will block quote any of these

>#Heading

>text

>| indented address

although the following correctly requires 1+4=5 spaces preceding the verbatim \text\

>     verbatim \text\

The results are confusing. Could Block Quotations be consistently indicated by > followed by a space, so the first three examples are not block quoted?

I believe the README should be corrected, since almost all markdown processors interpret >text as a blockquote. So it should say:

A block quotation is one or more paragraphs or other block elements (such as lists or headers), with each line preceded by a > character and an optional space.