Thread:Project:Support desk/Suddenly, actions hang on pages whose titles end in a non-ASCII character

We have a small internal wiki running, um, ahem... 1.16.5 (I could explain, but you wouldn't buy it). Everything was fine till June. After a break for July, I got around to applying a few months worth of Ubuntu upgrades. There have been no wiki-internal changes in the meantime, and my original Apache config files seem intact.

But now the wiki hangs when asked to perform an tab-action on any page whose name ends in a non-ASCII character -- edit, history, move, etc. The request will wait and wait until the browser gives up. A page with a non-ASCII character in the middle of the title continues to work fine.

With pages named Ko'ã is a word and Ko'ã, apparently the first URL is fine, but the second URL now confuses the hell out of something somewhere:

http://mysite.com/w/index.php?title=Ko%27%C3%A3 is a word&action=edit

http://mysite.com/w/index.php?title=Ko%27%C3%A3&action=edit

Does this behaviour ring a bell for anyone?

Is there a simple workaround? (Renaming all the pages wouldn't really be an option, even if "move" weren't one of the broken actions.) Should I try reverting Ubuntu's upgrades to Apache and/or PHP and/or MySQL?

I was going to try to upgrade MediaWiki sometime this summer anyway, and I'd consider that now if it would really solve the problem. But I get the impression that it's an agonizing enough process, even without trying to do it on top of an existing mystery bug and a possibly corrupted database, so I'd prefer to get this fixed first, if possible.

Details:

MediaWiki: 1.16.5

PHP: 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.20 (apache2handler)

MySQL: 5.1.70-0ubuntu0.10.04.1

Thanks for any pointers.

-- Kevin Russell