User blog comment:Ohmyn0/Making your wiki HTML5 compliant/@comment-5473581-20120707015321

Cool.

I know how to get a database dump from Special:Statistics and search for those elements, but that might be too much work for a lot of users (and admins!).

I think the simplest solution is to replace all relevant tags with templates based on the function of the tag. Replacing centered text with centered text, where is a template for a. This is possibly something that could be done by a bot en masse - although it would probably have to be an opt-in service.

Perhaps Wikia can offer some kind of automated tool to generate a report of pages containing deprecated tags? Special:OldHTML perhaps?