Say, e.g., api.php?action=query&list=logevents looks fine, but when I look at the same table in an SQL dump, the Chinese utf8 is just a latin1 jumble. How can I convert such strings back to utf8? I can't find the place where MediaWiki converts them back and forth.
You see I'm just curious, let's say all I had was the SQL dump, and GNU/Linux tools, but no MediaWiki. How can I get the original UTF-8 strings back out of the SQL dump?