Thread:Project:Support desk/Problem with UTF8 in 1.22 - 1.24 upgrade/reply

You obviously have a charset problem somewhere in MySQL. Please make sure that:


 * The DB itself uses UTF-8 encoding
 * Each table uses UTF-8 encoding
 * All columns, which have a charset, use UTF-8.

Should there currently be another encoding somewhere, then the data in the affected columns must be converted to UTF-8.

Additionally, the following MySQL variables should be set:
 * character_set_client = utf8;
 * character_set_results = utf8;
 * character_set_connection = utf8;

This basically is what $wgDBmysql5 = true; does. This should then make sure that MediaWiki is really using UTF-8 for the database.

Note that before you start changing anything in that regard, you should really have a working backup, especially of the DB. Otherwise fixing errors made during the charset conversion will be very hard.