Manual:$wgLegacyEncoding

Localization: $wgLegacyEncoding
Set this to eg 'ISO-8859-1' to perform character set conversion when loading old revisions not marked with "utf-8" flag.
Introduced in version:	1.4.0
Removed in version:	still in use
Allowed values:
Default value:	false

Other settings: Alphabetical | By Function

Details

Set this to eg 'ISO-8859-1' to perform character set conversion when loading old revisions not marked with "utf-8" flag. Use this when converting wiki to UTF-8 without the burdensome mass conversion of old text data.

NOTE! This DOES NOT touch any fields other than old_text and ar_text. Titles, comments, user names, etc still must be converted en masse in the database before continuing as a UTF-8 wiki.