Thread:Project:Support desk/Run math.php with Mediawiki 1.23.1 under Windows/reply (3)

When you start changing the value of $wgDBmysql5 you will break your wiki. You will get a charset mix, which will be nearly impossible to fix. Please read the notes on Manual:$wgDBmysql5 before changing the value of this variable!

For the different charsets/collations, which you have in your DB right now, you should convert anything, that is not UTF-8, to UTF-8. Note that you will have to convert the existing content accordingly - just changing the default charset of the affected columns/tables/the whole DB is not enough!

Also note that - before you start converting anything - you should check, how the content in your DB is really encoded: Also when the columns use some kind of utf-8 encoding, this does not mean, that there actually really is utf-8 encoded stuff inside. In old times people used to store their utf-8 encoded data in latin1 columns...