Editing Manual/Upgrading (section)

===How do I upgrade from a really old version? In one step, or in several steps?=== <!--T:125-->
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<translate><!--T:126--> It depends: If you are '''upgrading from MediaWiki 1.4 or older''', you should upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5 first.</translate>
<translate><!--T:560--> If you are upgrading from a Latin-1 wiki, use upgrade1_5.php (found in MediaWiki 1.5) to convert the relevant parts of the database to UTF-8 (<tvar name=latin></tvar> needs to be set to true in your <tvar name=localsettings></tvar> for this to work).</translate>
<translate><!--T:561--> Next, run <tvar name=1><code>update.php</code></tvar>, and then set the <tvar name=2></tvar> option in <tvar name=3><code>LocalSettings.php</code></tvar> to the encoding previously used by the wiki (e.g. windows-1252).</translate>
<translate><!--T:614--> This is basically how Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation sites were upgraded from MediaWiki 1.4 to 1.5 – see some [[<tvar name=4>wikitech:Obsolete:1.5 upgrade</tvar>|related notes at Wikitech]].</translate>
<translate><!--T:562--> You may need to upgrade to MediaWiki 1.4 before running the upgrade1.5 script.</translate>
<translate><!--T:175--> If you want to make a database dump (e.g. MySQL) of your Latin-1 wiki, make sure the type of the <tvar name=1><code>old_text</code></tvar> field in the <tvar name=2></tvar> table is <tvar name=3><code>mediumblob</code></tvar>, not <tvar name=4><code>mediumtext</code></tvar>, to avoid character encoding issues.</translate>

<translate><!--T:127--> If you are '''upgrading from MediaWiki 1.5 or newer''' to '''1.35''', you can upgrade in one step.</translate>
<translate><!--T:225--> The vast majority of reports, as well as automated testing, indicated that doing it in one step works just fine.</translate>
<translate><!--T:226--> If you have trouble believing this, read [[<tvar name=mail>mailarchive:mediawiki-l/2008-October/028975.html</tvar>|this mailing list post]].</translate>
<translate><!--T:227--> However, please note that when you update from old versions, chances that you will encounter PHP errors are bigger than when you upgrade from the version directly previous to the new version.</translate>
<translate><!--T:228--> You would have received these errors anyway, had you not skipped versions, but the errors would have been associated with each individual update.</translate>
<translate><!--T:229--> Instead, if you update several versions at once, you'll get the same set of errors all at the same time.</translate>
<translate><!--T:230--> This will make the upgrade more difficult, but do not forget that you did not have the trouble of updating to the intermediate versions, which you skipped!</translate>

<translate><!--T:240--> If you are '''upgrading to MediaWiki 1.36''' or later, only upgrades from the last two LTS releases are supported (<tvar name=1>[[phab:T259771]]</tvar>).</translate>
<translate><!--T:616--> This will mean that for very old versions, that you first upgrade to MediaWiki 1.35 and then upgrade to 1.43, and then (if you want to upgrade to a non-LTS version) upgrade to <tvar name=1></tvar>.</translate>

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