Thread:Project:Support desk/UTF8 Problem with update from 1.16 to 1.17/reply (8)

> Is it necessary to turn the page table (of the new database) to binary??

No, it is not. What you must have in the table is data, which is UTF-8 encoded. This is important, because MediaWiki always writes data as UTF-8 (and always expects to get back UTF-8 encoded data from the DB). You can either use UTF-8 encoding or binary encoding (in this case MediaWiki will just store its UTF-8 data in the binary tables, which is fine as well).