Change database character set in an existing MediaWiki installation

I have an existing Mediawiki installation, for which I suppose I chose the MySQL 4.1/5.0 binary option when installing.

Two years later, I'm having problems with Mediawiki's fulltext search on accented chars, and then would like to switch to MySQL 4.1/5.0 UTF-8 to use MySQL's native UTF-8 support.

Is there a safe way to do this? I c开发者_如何学Could obviously convert all tables to UTF-8 in a batch, but I suppose there are a few options in Mediawiki that need to be updated accordingly, and maybe a few caches / search indexes to rebuild?

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The affected settings are $wgDBmysql5 and $wgDBTableOptions (check the talk pages for some useful information). The scripts in the maintenance dir starting with rebuild, refresh or update can help in fixing caches and indexes. I wouldn't call it a safe way (I don't know of any), but worth a try after a full backup.