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 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 changes when you convert XML to MediaWiki
The first repeating element is treated as the rows. Attributes are read alongside child elements and prefixed so they do not collide with a same-named tag. Nesting one level deep becomes dotted column names; deeper structures are kept as text.
The wikitable class is applied, which is what gives the table borders and header shading on Wikipedia.
What carries over from XML to MediaWiki
One property of the XML has no home in MediaWiki, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in MediaWiki, so a null and an empty string in the XML both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
MediaWiki marks header cells differently from data cells, so the keys are lifted out and written once as a marked header row rather than repeated on every row.
The identifier 007 comes out of the MediaWiki 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 MediaWiki file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the MediaWiki.