Reading one of Martin F. Krafft's entries in Planet Debian,[1] I learned about an interesting format called "reStructuredText."[2] At first glance, it appears to live up to its name as being simple and easy to use. It is somewhat related to the wiki formatting styles you commonly see, but not requiring the html input form, should prove more useful and more worth knowing (as each wiki seems to have its own rules, they are not in general worth learning).
[1] Krafft, Martin F. "Restructured text for the CV"
untitled. 2005-08-25 http://blog.madduck.net/2005/08/26/2005.08.25-cv
[2] Docutils project. "reStructuredText" (online) 2005-06-16
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html