Thread:Project:Support desk/Cacaophany of failures updating mediawiki from (I think 1.14?) to current.

My in-house wiki for a game I'm developing was randomly blank, so I contacted my server admin, and got this response :

We are sorry for the inconvenience. However, the outdated MediaWiki installed on your account is not compatible with any new versions of PHP that is currently running on your server - those are PHP 5.3, 5.4 or 5.5. Please note that we have removed the outdated php 5.2 from our server. You'll need to upgrade Mediawiki to the latest version to resolve the issue. Please refer http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading

After following the instructions there, nothing seemed to work. I didn't even have a mw-config folder. Eventually I read that you have to upgrade from 1.14 to 1.15, and THEN upgrade to current. However, since the first botched attempt, updating to 1.15 now also fails.

I asked my admin to do some poking around himself, and he came to the same results I did:

I have also tried to update the MediaWiki manually and it ends up on blank page with the following error logs; [25-Jul-2014 20:05:42 America/New_York] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'Namespace' (T_NAMESPACE), expecting identifier (T_STRING) in /home/bavnbzjp/wiki/includes/Namespace.php on line 52 [25-Jul-2014 20:06:23 America/New_York] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'Namespace' (T_NAMESPACE), expecting identifier (T_STRING) in /home/bavnbzjp/wiki/includes/Namespace.php on line 52 [25-Jul-2014 20:06:26 America/New_York] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'Namespace' (T_NAMESPACE), expecting identifier (T_STRING) in /home/bavnbzjp/wiki/includes/Namespace.php on line 52 So, I have restored the original wiki folder as you left and copied the upgrade tried folder as "wiki-tried-update"

I am also not getting a solution for the same from mediawiki forums for this. I would suggest you to submit the issue to MediaWiki support at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Support_desk for the suggestions from them.

Is there a way to COMPLETELY reinstall mediawiki and then point to my old database? What do you guys suggest? As it stands now, my wiki is simply showing a blank white page : wiki.arcknight.com