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 Markdown is
A Markdown table is rows of pipe-separated cells with a dashed rule under the header. Alignment is set by placing colons in that rule.
README files, GitHub issues, documentation sites, Obsidian and Notion.
What changes when you convert MediaWiki to Markdown
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.
Cells are padded so the source lines up in a plain text editor, pipes inside values are escaped, and line breaks inside a cell become <br> because a Markdown table row cannot span lines.
What carries over from MediaWiki to Markdown
MediaWiki records 2 things about a table that Markdown has no way to hold.
MediaWiki can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. Markdown has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in Markdown, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Markdown 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 Markdown file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Markdown.