Manual talk:$wgDBmysql5
From MediaWiki.org
Charset problem after switching to wgDBmysql5 = true[edit | edit source]
Hello,
After years, we finally solve our charset issue and have been able to switch back to "wgDBmysql5 = false".
One of our symptoms was some special characters (like "φ") were converted silently (corrupt) into literal question marks (?).
How we resolved it is documented here in English and in French.
I hope this will help!
Jean-Luc