Thread:Project:Support desk/I lost my MediaWiki Skin Files and How do I upgrade my MediaWiki to the newest version? (2)/reply

If it was just the default skin which you got with MediaWiki, you can extract it out of the MediaWiki package for your version. If you used a custom skin, maybe you can get it from a download server anywhere? Or do you maybe have a backup of your wiki? Or you could just risk writing the developers a mail and asking them, if they still have the files somewhere. If it was created for your wiki only and is not used anywhere else, it will be hard to get it back.

Guessing the version of your wiki without access to it is hard. The version can be seen on Special:Version. If you have FTP access to the site, you can open the file includes/DefaultSettings.php with a text editor. In one of the first lines you will see a definition for $wgVersion = ... This is your version number.

If you want to update your wiki, you should just begin going through the descriptions on Manual:Upgrading. When you actually do each step, you will see, that it is not that hard. :-) Basically you only need to do two things: 1) Replace the old MediaWiki files with the new files and 2) run the installer (e.g. by navigating your webbrowser to //mw-config/index.php). After that your update basically already is complete. Possibly you still have to update some extensions (if you use any) and update your skin (if it should look somehow strange with the new MediaWiki version). That's all.