The MediaWiki API seems to add paragraph tags when it parses wikitext, but only sometimes. Example:
http://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Extension:Header/ve...
This page (Extension:Header/version) contains only the text "1.0" but gets turned into "<p>1.0</p>" when parsed via API. On the other hand, the <p> tag is absent if you transclude {{Extension:Header/version}} into another wiki article.
This doesn't happen if your wiki page contains just a table, so something tricky is going on here. :-)
Is there a way to make api.php suppress the <p> tag in my first example?
Thanks, DanB