Yes, your theory is correct. mysqldump will be too intelligent. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki
Thanks for the help. I think you tend on the "Character set" Section (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki#Character_set).
My prolbem is that my old provider does not provide the console program "mysqldump". The only way for me is to export via phpmyadmin. And there I can't use the option "-default-character-set=latin1".
Is there a way to convert the dump after export?
(Forgive me, if I am double posting. Tried it two times with the Newsgroup Server, but the messages never showed up ... even after waiting some hours).
Best regards, Kai