You normally need to instruct mysqldump not to bother messing about
with the character set during export; see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki#Character_set.
The problem is I don't have the possibility to use mysqldump (with that appropriate "--deafault-character-set" Option) from the command line. My provider does not provide it.
You may also be able to run the dump file through iconv or similar if it's been corrupted.
Tried iconv, but it also failed. After conversation I get an "Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes" error during importing.
Is it really such a hard problem to backup the Wikipedia data? Cause the problem I have, must also involve a normal backup. No way to simply export and import the database back via phpmyadmin on MySQL 5 databases. All foreign special chars get corrupt. I wonder, why only so few people seem to have that problem.
Kai