This page is all about Collation in MediaWiki - and should probably become a new article to supplement the general topic page.
== See Also==
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgCategoryCollation and https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/maintenance/updateCollation.php
Other maintenance scripts such as https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/maintenance/uppercaseTitlesForUnicodeTransition.php or other extensions etc. may be helpful if you need to "fix" things.
In MWStake General, I [https://matrix.to/#/!NGZmJSwAAwbGRxhWwH:matrix.org/$HObrGFUPO_XBbhS3STTjQ5R-i-uV3cRjVIpPuAhP0i4?via=matrix.org&via=marijn.it&via=converser.eu said]
Short answer:
1. yes, you should change the <code>$wgDBTableOptions</code> (see below) to the new default.
However, this setting is only used during new table creation, so it doesn't really affect your existing database(s) and the tables in them.
2. Do NOT <code>CONVERT TO</code> all your existing tables. You have to be more precise with what columns you change - if you change anything at all. You really only convert if you have some encoding problem (aka [[wp:Mojibake|Mojibake]]).
Using
* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_requirements#Database_server '''Seems like a 'bug' to have a minimum DB requirement for a DB that is out of support'''
* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MysqlUpdater.php - a class called by the Installer that performs database updates.
== Conversion ==
If you need to do conversion, check out the [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.3/en/charset-conversion.html MySQL docs v8.3] and [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/charset-conversion.html MySQL docs v5.7]
== checkStorage.php ==
What does the [https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/classCheckStorage.html CheckStorage] class ([https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:CheckStorage.php Manual] [https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/checkStorage_8php_source.html source]) actually do? It is used in conjunction with the [[mw:Manual:External_storage|Manual:External_storage]] ([https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/External_storage Wikitech]) capability of MediaWiki and therefore is irrelevant here because we're not using External Storage. But, here's the output of running the script for information's sake:
<pre>