beau wrote:

How do you make sql dumps?

A suggestion might be a report about what the current revision of MediaWiki the
wiki is running on during the dumping of the wiki database, and output it in
the same dump page. Not sure if this is possible entirely though (especially
enwiki that takes very long, and there might be code pushed to the live site
meanwhile).

The pages-articles (and meta-current and meta-history) files, as well as the stub file, all contain in the MW version in the site information header:

<generator>MediaWiki 1.20wmf4</generator>

With regular branches and deployments of code in production, I would expect that we would not deploy schema changes mid-branch.

Sooner or later the en wp dumps will wind up running during a deployment that pushes out a new schema, and so some of the tables will be dumped with one schema and some with another. In this case the dump files themselves are their own best documentation. I'm going to wontfix this (feel free to repoen if you have a compelling solution).