currently I have this:
Old Mediawiki 1.11.0 (from 2007!) on shared webhosting (so no shell access) with about 200 articles and many thousand spam articles I deleted via the Webinterface (but they are still saved in the MySQL-database which is about 80MB).
I want to move it to my own server (with root access) using the current Mediawiki release with SQlite. What would be the best way to archive this?
In a first attempt I tried to move the Mediawiki 1.11.0 and the database dump to a temporary VPS running Ubuntu 14.04 with Apache and MySQL. I couldn't get the old Mediawiki 1.11.0 to run on the new server since the PHP versions differ a lot, the old Mediawiki apparently used "Namespaces" as a variable name which conflict with the new PHP namespaces, SpamBlocklist extension used deprecated pass-by-reference and many other issues. I would be able to install Ubuntu 12.04, but I guess that PHP-Version is still too new. My VPS provider doesn't offer a Ubunbu 10.04 or older template.
What are my options? I want to start over the wiki without all the spam article revisions in the database, but I would like to keep the revisions of the real articles. Can I just extract the new Mediawiki release and point it to the old database? Or should I update the Mediawiki on the shared webhosting to a newer version first (remember: no shell access, 80MB database and likely restrictive PHP timeout settings)?
