Markdown...ugh. Let's just stick to DokuWiki or Mediawiki syntax for everything, please. If you need something more advanced than that, you should be using LaTeX. Actually, it'd be cool to build a working MediaWiki + Markdown => LaTeX converter....in something like Python.
"Personally I'd be happy to see any markup language becoming the default."
I don't agree with this. All lightweight humane markup languages are not born equal, some are better others, and Mediawiki's is not in the list of the best ones. Now there seem to be a trend towards Markdown, but it should be improved and then, migrating Wikipedia to this Markdown2 could be a real good thing.
> it'd be cool to build a working MediaWiki + Markdown => LaTeX converter....in something like Python.
For parsing MediaWiki in Python, check out mwlib [1], which was part of cooperation between Wikimedia Foundation and PediaPress. It's neither very complete nor very fast, but you might be able to hack up some LaTeX conversion with it.
There are actually a bunch of Markdown parsers that create a DOM, or at least a proper tree (e.g markdown2 in PyPI). Markdown is outrageously simple compared to MediaWiki.
I actually wrote a subset-of-MediaWiki parser in C#, which stayed at the "subset" stage because of the ridiculous complexity and corner-cases that crop up even very early.
