I tend to write a good amount of documentation so the MediaWiki format to me is easy for me to understand plus it saves me a lot of time than having to write traditional HTML.
The best would be to use MediaWiki parser. The good news is that MediaWiki 1.19 will provide a command line tool just for that!
Disclaimer: I wrote that tool.
The script is maintenance/parse.php
some usage examples straight from the source code:
Entering text yourself, ending it with Control + D:
$ php maintenance/parse.php --title foo
''[[foo]]''^D
<p><i><strong class="selflink">foo</strong></i>
</p>
$
The usual file input method:
$ echo "'''bold'''" > /tmp/foo.txt
$ php maintenance/parse.php /tmp/foo.txt
<p><b>bold</b>
</p>$
And of course piping to stdin:
$ cat /tmp/foo | php maintenance/parse.php
<p><b>bold</b>
</p>$
as of today you can get the script from http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/maintenance/parse.php and place it in your maintenance directory. It should work with MediaWiki 1.18
The script will be made available with MediaWiki 1.19.0.
This page lists tons of MediaWiki parsers that you could try.
Looked into this a bit and think that a good route to take here would be to learn to a general markup language like restucturedtext or markdown and then be able to convert from there. Discovered a program called pandoc that can convert either of these to HTML and Mediawiki. Appreciate the help.
Example:
pandoc -f mediawiki -s myfile.mediawiki -o myfile.html -s