Christian Lerrahn wrote:
my Mediawiki 1.7 can't display any UTF-8 characters. My MySQL server defaults to UTF-8 and my tables usually have collation latin1_bin. This is exactly how things were set up when I installed Mediawiki. However, my interwiki links did not work until I changed the collation of column iw_prefix to latin1_swedish_ci. Even now I cannot use any UTF-8 characters in Mediawiki. I have another install that runs most columns (not all) on latin1_swedish_ci and there UTF-8 seems to work fine. I'm now wondering if I have to manually change my columns on the non-working install to latin1_swedish_ci or if there is also a way of getting this to work with the latin1_bin columns.
Did some more digging on this. The "stock" answer I keep seeing in my searches is that you should keep the database in latin1. But that doesn't seem to work any longer since we're having problems with latin1 interwiki link tables.
After reading your solution, I went in and manually changed collation of the mw_interwiki table from 'latin1_bin' to 'utf8_general_ci' and it appeared to work (interwiki links started working). However, I have no idea what other problems this might cause. Doing that might not let me re-import a database dump correctly. There's currently no unicode characters currently in our interwiki table though, so maybe it doesn't matter. The collation of my database is also set to utf_general_ci, with all tables other than mw_interwiki set to latin1_bin.
I did find this http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=rev&revision=17549 recent work by Brion in SVN, and I wonder if it will be of assistance when 1.9 is released. Perhaps he can comment on that.