Wiki

Caveats to the above:
1) Watch out for class statements in your markup! If there is no class definition then text in the paragraphs tagged with the class will simply be dropped when the page is pulled into the wiki.
2) the file must have no extensions (well, your file can have extensions but the extensions must then be referenced in your mark-up) so with MS Windows PCs this can be a royal pain as the OS does not typically show the file extensions in the file name. The manual drudgery amounts to creating a text file, copying the html markup from your wiki mockup, saving the file and then zipping all the files - then upload, unzip, and rename each file, deleting txt - yes there are undoubtedly easier ways to do this.....
3) Watch out for things like spaces in your page names! While the wiki itself may handle spaces in the page names just fine, when you create the text file for that page you have a problem. WHile there may be some more elegant solution, simply putting underscores between words in the files works fine, but this means that you also have to do that inside your text files any time you internally reference another wiki page.

And as to html2wiki conversion?

This actually worked better than I had expected, but the obvious cautions must be observed:
4) You must have comparable markup. In testing phpwiki there were issues as well as with a number of others.... I will post the question of comparability among wiki markup syntax separately in the hope that the additional question will draw some attention....
5) Beware of the caveats above, however some conversions will attempt to resolve spaces in the names and other such questions.
6) The results of the conversion is real wiki markup, while the results produced by the process recommended in the prior post (develop wiki mockup and then cut and paste html) produces html interpreted by the wiki module.

WIll this work for student as well as group wikis? It appeared to do just that!

Bottom line: Yes, this appears to be a way to create extensive wiki "templates" that can be rolled out to individual students to provide everything from a senesters reading prompts and journals to laboratory notebooks. Why, you might ask, are details about how to implement this so difficult to find when one might expect that this might be a critical tool in the use of Moodle.... And that indeed is the question....