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 XML is
XML marks up data with nested named tags and optional attributes. It is verbose, strict about being well-formed, and can carry a schema that says what shape a document must have.
Enterprise integrations, government data feeds, RSS, SOAP services and older document formats.
What changes when you convert MediaWiki to XML
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.
Each row becomes an element with one child per column. Header names are rewritten where they have to be, because an XML tag cannot start with a digit or contain a space, so a column called 2024 Sales becomes _2024_Sales.
What carries over from MediaWiki to XML
MediaWiki records 2 things about a table that XML has no way to hold.
XML 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 XML and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the XML 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 XML file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are written as the HTML entity " in the XML.