MediaWiki MySQL Database Character set, which one to use?

Question

I'm installing MediaWiki and am confused which charset to use. I installed MediaWiki before but never took care of this: I used the default choice (which is Binary), and it didn't cause any problem, but now it's different and I can make no mistake.

The wiki I'm installing is mainly using Arabic, the language is Arabic.

Which Database charset should I use?

Answer 1

Use the default, binary. Historically, it was the only option when MySQL's Unicode support was so broken that it corrupted non-BMP characters. Later, utf8 was added to MediaWiki as an experiment, but it resulted in corruption for some weird languages. Not so long ago, utf8mb4 charset was finally introduced in MySQL 5.5 that fixes this problem, but it isn't supported by MW yet.