general Wiki format question and Python Wiki markup parsing libraries

[chris]

hi,
i am looking for a way to structure the text in XML comments to produce 
a XHTML doc format for the XMLs (in this case XSLT).
so is was thinking about using a wiki like text format. e.g. something like
<!--
!Headline

some __bold__ text in a paragraph

* a list
* another item

etc... (the markup used is only an example!)

-->

but it should be a widely used format that people do not need to learn 
yet another syntax.
it will be used by people using XSLT so it should not be language (py, 
perl, java, ...) specific.

is there something like a "standard" wiki format at all, or at least one 
that is widely used?
in my company we use a jspwiki which e.g. uses !, !! and !!! for 
headlines, __bold__ and * list markup (like the example above). is this 
more or less a standard as this is the only wiki i've used yet?


i was googling for python libraries which would parse a wiki text format 
to xhtml but could not find something really useful.

is there a python library to parse these text formats? i was looking a 
bit into reStructuredText but was wondering if this is generally used or 
maybe is too Python specific.

any hint would be great
thanks
chris