Adopt mediawiki format
From eg
This is a wiki best practice already adopted by Wikimedia, Wikinfo/Getwiki and jamwiki. Freebase.com also relies on data in this format.
A mediawiki monoculture is evolving due to the data weight of Wikipedias in dozens of languages, and their strong name precedent effect. It's increasingly obvious that any proprietary or custom wiki software must adopt mediawiki format native. No rational alternatives exist. If some future wiki markup standard emerges, then there will certainly be a perfect or near-perfect Wikipedia converter, almost by definition. In that case a small market wiki will be able to piggyback on that same perfect converter. If a standard does not emerge, then mediawiki markup, already the de facto standard, will simply become the formal standard, and your software's already compatible.
Maintaining this compatibility must be the first requirement of any custom wiki software.
"Just ignore any wiki that doesn't support mediawiki format native, or puts too much effort into tracking and supporting and converting to/from other formats. Mediawiki isn't the best front end (probably tikiwiki is), and it hasn't even adopted the best features of its own forks (like getwiki), but there is no arguing with, nor reproducing, millions of articles in dozens of languages. The de facto standard has been set. Just consider the difficulty of trying to convert that many articles if you stop supporting, say, commas in page names. It's impossible.
If you have any influence over any wiki development team, get them to abandon their native format in favour of mediawiki's. That way, if a standard does develop, at least the effort to convert will be concentrated and there is some chance of the data maintained by that wiki software's users actually being converted properly (since the Wikipedia converter by definition must work perfectly or the "standard" will fail). And if no standard other than the current de facto standard, mediawiki, ever emerges, you're already compatible with it." - from MeatballWiki.
Data not in mediawiki format must be converted so it is in mediawiki format. It will then require extensive manual effort to ensure it meets naming conventions specific to that format.
