mediawiki move and upgrade at once

Question

I'm considering to move one of the company internal wikis (very basic wiki with few/no extensions and not so many pages) to another machine and wondering if at the same time I can upgrade the mediawiki version, passing from 1.6 to the current latest 1.25 (in order to use extensions only available for the latest versions)

The Upgrade guide

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading

seems to omit the scenario in which an upgrade of the underlying software (apache,mysql) is also required for setting up the target version.

and the Moving guide

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Moving_a_wiki

strictly recommends that source and target wikis share the same software level.

So I'm a bit stuck. I would attempt an export/import of an xml dump, but I'm not confident for the above reason (there is a huge version gap in source and target wikis)

Or is there a better way to approach the problem? Thx

Edit after some tests

I consider Florian's answer the most safe and advisable, but I would share the final solution I came up with.

1. Install the new wiki (blank)

2. Export an xml dump of the original wiki

   php maintenance\dumpBackup.php --full > dump.xml
   

I first encountered a "Cannot connect to database" error. So i had to add in the LocalSettings.php the lines

$wgDBadminuser=...
$wgDBadminpassword=...

3. Import the xml dump in the new wiki (first try in dry-run mode)

   php maintenance\importDump.php --dry-run < dump.xml
   php maintenance\importDump.php < dump.xml
   

Then I was prompted to run

php maintenance\rebuildrecentchanges.php

5. Copy the physical files from the old to the new wiki, in the same path(for common wikis they should be in the "images" folder. That was not my case).

6. Re-create the users (manually) in the new wiki

7. Last edited the LocalSettings.php with the most essential settings I wanted to preserve (groups, restrictions,...) .

And the moving was done! The new wiki is ok and already usable at this stage: pages are there, links are working..

Answer 1

In fact, it should work, if you move the wiki from one server to another and after that upgrade it on the new server. Like you may already know, it's important to backup all files and data you have for the wiki in the "old" environment, so you can easily restore it from there.

If I would want to do, what you want to do, I would first follow the "Moving a wiki" guide except the "Test" section. After that I would upgrade the wiki to the newest version. Now I can test the wiki intensively to see, if anything worked well.

If you don't want to do that, you really need to upgrade the wiki in the "old" source and move it after that. If I understand you correctly, that would require an update of the server software (I expect php and mysql?).