Thread:Project:Support desk/Upgrading from 1.15 to current, with no bureaucrat or admin

S.O.S. - the information in my library's Reference Desk Wiki is too valuable to lose.

I need some suggestions on the best way to go - and my tech skills have withered as I refined my librarian skills (i.e. I just barely learned java, never learned php, etc when work at *other libraries* became more specialized and the IT folks did it all). I am "new" to my place of employment and now working with our IT staff to upgrade and migrate my dept staff wiki (made by webmaster for Dept - not IT - I work in the Place of Many Silos).

We have Mediawiki 1.15 with very outdated PHP and MySQL running on an internal server with IIS 5 (according to previous staff, that was used instead of Apache - huh?). There was a lot of tweaking to make it run on the platform and she said it would be next to impossible to trace it all through upgrades.

NO bureaucrat nor Admin/SysOp user account in our MediaWiki - I don't know if the accounts were deleted when people retired - but there isn't even a generic account. I tried following earlier post about making all users Bureaucrat, but seems that our version is too old (or I really missed the boat). And to complicate matters, ports are secured (by state agency requirements) so I get errors from WAMP and AMPS when I try in a development area.

Looks like 2009 was last time anything was modified on our site - about 1 1/2 yrs before we migrated off the Novell network and a year before I was hired.

I am trying to decide if (looking for recommendations):
 * 1) we lose the revision history and attempt to load the backup file into a new version without going through all the steps of migration;
 * 2) go through the steps of upgrading PHP, MySQL and Mediaiki and risk it breaking at any step along the way;
 * 3) I try to cut and paste everything on browser display into a completely new version and forget about the older stuff in the underlying structure (I'm REALLY good at ctrl A; ctrl C; ctrl V; ctrl S);
 * 4) It was been suggested I try to run some of the text files through OpenRefine and get information into SharePoint;
 * 5) Contracting out to get it migrated is not an option either;
 * 6) purchasing software, plugins, etc only possible if inexpensive.

Any suggestions as to the best way to begin? Thanks! Jenny