Setting up a wiki from raw files

Solution 1:

I see AdminSettings.php so this is almost certainly a MediaWiki installation. What you are going to want to do is emulate the old system that this was hosted on, most likely a LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Essentially, you are going to want to do the following steps (very much simplified):

1. Build new LAMP server
2. Copy data to public_html or /var/www/
3. Import database to MySQL
4. Modify LocalSettings.php to fit your local system
5. Get data from there.

Also, Special:Export and Special:Import would work as well. The advantage to doing this the way I listed above is that you will have exactly the same environment that was at the old university, if they made any modifications to the site.

Solution 2:

Unless that "copy" contains the database files in the mysql-data (.myd) then it probably does not have the data you are looking for. If you do have the .MYD file, then you have the actual MySQL database that the Wiki was run against and you should be able to attach that to another MySQL instance and query the data there.

Solution 3:

This isn't really useful for your particular application, and I'm not sure how scalable a solution it is, but DokuWiki stores all its data as text files in an open format. Should Bad Things happen like this, it becomes a godsend as the data is readable by human beings. It might be a good idea to suggest its use in the future to researchers at your University, especially the ones who aren't working on ultra-secret projects.