So, Wikitravel uses the default ISO-8859-1 encoding, and we're starting to need UTF-8 characters.
I think the process for converting might be as follows:
1. Shut down the site. 2. Backup the database with a data dump. 3. iconv the dump file to UTF-8. 4. Twiddle with mysql till it knows to use UTF-8. 5. Twiddle with PHP's php.ini till it knows to use UTF-8. 6. Change the encoding in LocalSettings.php to use UTF-8. 7. Delete everything in the database. 8. Import the data dump back in. 9. Turn the site back on. 10. Hope for the best.
Does this sound about right? Have any other MediaWiki installations switched encodings midstream like this?
~ESP