Thread:Project:Support desk/UTF8 Problem with update from 1.16 to 1.17/reply (12)

I can't tell you how exactly you have to CONVERT TO CHARSET your data. It depends on what character set you actually had in the database. When you end up with UTF-8 after your operation, it's all fine.

The tables, which did not accept binary encoding really should not be binary, but UTF-8. If I remember correctly, there actually was a reason to keep these tables in UTF-8. After all it does not really matter, if you use UTF-8 or binary, because MediaWiki will provide UTF-8 data anyway, so using UTF-8 won't make something break.