[Mediawiki-l] backup advice wanted

[roger at rogerchrisman.com]

How can I see what character set my MediaWiki's mysql database is using?

The following tip from
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki#Character_set
did not work for me:

  "You can see which character set your tables are using with a statement like
   SHOW CREATE TABLE text. The last line will include a DEFAULT
CHARSET clause."

Here's my attempt to do that:

--------------------------------------------------

[roger at cpanel68 ~]$ mysql -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 5295221
Server version: 5.0.45-community-log MySQL Community Edition (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE text
   ->
---------------------------------------------------

I know little about mysql. Do you see what I did wrong?

I'm worried that my database might be in character set "latin1" and
that mysqldump may corrupt my backup database by auto-converting it to
"UTF-8". I don't know what character set the database actually is in
and don't want to mess it up setting it to "latin1" if it is not
already that.

How can I check the character set of my MediaWiki's mysql database (it
is on a Redhat Linux server)?

Thanks!
Roger
   *  MediaWiki: 1.9.2
   * PHP: 5.2.6 (cgi)
   * MySQL: 5.0.45-community-log