[Mediawiki-l] Help with new installation

[Platonides]

B. M. Whealton wrote:
> Hello all,
>          I had a somewhat small wiki with not a lot of content in it, so 
> when things went wrong with my mediawiki 1.15.x installation upgrade to 
> mediawiki 1.16.0, I just started with a fresh install.  At about the 
> time that I figured out that mediawiki 1.16 was the latest version and I 
> was using 1.15.x, I also was running into an error when I added a couple 
> extensions.  It was telling me that a cache table did not exist and this 
> was crashing my site, my wiki.  I couldn't just create an empty table 
> because I had no idea how many columns were in that table.
>          Anyway, I thought with the new installation I could bring in 
> the content, the articles from the old installation.  The problem is 
> that in looking at my exported db, a mysql db, that I exported from 
> phpmyAdmin and my cpanel, and from just browsing the db, I see that the 
> content of the articles are in binary files.  So, it's not text that I 
> can just copy and paste into new articles - I only had about 10 of them. 
>   Is there a way to get at those binary files that contain the text of 
> the articles, and the wiki code and somehow either import it into my new 
> wiki install or look at it and examine it in some way so that I could 
> copy and paste the content so as to recreate the articles.
>       I should note that I don't seem to have shell access, so I have to 
> use the cpanel and phpmyadmin.
> Thanks for any tips,
> Bruce

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki

The old database plus rerunning the installer (temporarily move away
LocalSettings.php) creates the new tables.

For exporting a few pages, you can use Special:Export, then Special:Import.