Thread:Project:Support desk/problem with characters like ñ or accents/reply

Until somebody competent properly answers your question, I'd like to suggest that you avoid editing your wiki. Your database is probably not corrupted, but if you now make changes to your wiki, you might introduce some corruption.

If you are upgrading from revision 1.4 or older to 1.5 or newer (presumably, you're upgrading to the newest revision) and you were not already using the experimental UTF-8 support, then this paragraph from the “UPGRADE” documentation file (in your MediaWiki installation folder) likely applies to your wiki:
 * “Among other changes, note that Latin-1 encoding (ISO-8859-1) is no longer supported. Latin-1 wikis will need to be upgraded to UTF-8; an experimental command-line upgrade helper script, 'upgrade1_5.php', can do this -- run it prior to 'update.php' or the web upgrader.”

The change of encoding (from Latin-1 to UTF-8) would cause the symptoms that you described (i.e., most text looks fine but accented characters are corrupted). If that is indeed your problem and you now edit your wiki, using the new version, your database will contain not only old text encoded in Latin-1 but also new text encoded in UTF-8. When you then run the conversion script, the new text (already in UTF-8) will be treated as if it was old Latin-1 text and “converted”, in other words, corrupted. So, if you have already made new edits, either forfeit them by starting over from the backup of your database (that you had used to re-install), or be prepared to manually fix those edits by hand after running the conversion and restarting your wiki.

The script “upgrade1_5.php” is in the “maintenance/” folder of your MediaWiki installation. Since the documentation file states that it must be run before running “update.php”, it might be preferable to start from your original backup (and redo the upgrade). Also, this article cautions to "make sure that “$wgUseLatin1 = true;” is set in “LocalSettings.php” while running “upgrade1_5.php”; indeed, it seems that “upgrade1_5.php” will simply skip the conversion if “$wgUseLatin1</tt>” is not set. Once the conversion is done, delete that line from “LocalSettings.php</tt>”.