I help run a small "wiki farm" with a wiki in several languages, including English (the primary), German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian.
Recently I upgraded the server software as follows:
MediaWiki from 1.14 to 1.25.1 PHP from about 5.2.5 to 5.5.27 MySQL to 5.6.23
For most of the wikis, page loading still works.
The Russian site is the problem. Before the update, any user typing in Cyrillic characters and Cyrillic page titles could always find them. Furthermore, Interwiki links to the Russian version of a page in another language always worked; the pages always loaded. But I always knew the page titles themselves were stored as UTF-8 and were human-unreadable. Because whenever I would get a watchlist notice of a change on a page on that wiki, the link would come through as UTF-8 and display as a lot of weird-looking characters that definitely were not Cyrillic. But the links were always good and would display as Cyrillic in my browser.
But now: no more. If I follow a link, it goes to the special search page. That page brings up several results, all of them with titles I can't read. Usually the first title on the list, is the page I'm looking for.
But how do I get the system to find the page by its Cyrillic title, as it always could before?
The other wikis work just fine, as before. But not the Russian one.