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Developer familiarity shouldn't be the top priority in my opinion. It should be establishing a standard that maintains familiarity and ease of learning/using while ensuring a sufficiently rich feature set. Pandoc markdown shares its base features with most other markdown flavors while providing a lot of extra features for things like tables, math symbol integration, etc., that will be important. Keep in mind that the real end user of the wiki format will be subject matter experts. Any sufficiently broad wiki will need input from lots of experts, and they will need the tools required to properly express information on their topic of specialty. Anything they need that isn't in the base spec is going to get custom rolled to fit their needs, and we'll start to see incompatibilities arise as different clients handle those needs in divergent ways. They're also in no way guaranteed to be software developers, so they're unlikely to have much familiarity with developer standards and tools.