What MediaWiki is
MediaWiki table markup opens with {| and a class, marks headers with an exclamation mark and rows with |-.
Wikipedia editors and anyone running a MediaWiki install.
What JSON is
JSON is a text format for nested data: objects with named keys, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and null. It has no date type and no comments.
Every web API, most configuration files and anything that talks to JavaScript.
What changes when you convert MediaWiki to JSON
Both cell styles are read: one cell per line, and several on a line separated by exclamation marks or double pipes, which is the form most Wikipedia tables use. Cell attributes before a single pipe are dropped, since style="text-align:right" is presentation rather than data. Wiki links come through as their display text, so [[France|the French Republic]] arrives as the French Republic, and reference markers are removed.
You choose the shape. An array of objects is the default and the one most code expects. A 2D array is smaller. Column arrays suit charting libraries. A keyed object suits lookups by id.
What carries over from MediaWiki to JSON
MediaWiki records 2 things about a table that JSON has no way to hold.
JSON wants a type for each column, and MediaWiki does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
JSON has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the MediaWiki - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in JSON and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the JSON as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a JSON file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the JSON.