[Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to UTF-8

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 10:29:25PM -0500, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Erik wrote:
> >Is this true? All I know is that we had a *lot* of problems 
> >with broken special chars on the Meta-Wiki during the logo 
> >contest. I have no idea which browser broke them, but it 
> >seems to be a not totally uncommon one, perhaps in the 
> >5% range. Given that a single edit by such a person will 
> >break an entire page, it might not be so wise to switch 
> >(but perhaps I'm missing something -- is Meta running UTF-8?).
> 
> IIRC meta is. And that fact has created some of the problems you mention. I 
> therefore see no compelling need to convert Latin-1 languages to UTF-8 and in 
> fact think such a switch would be harmful. It is also wrong-headed to state 
> (as Tomasz did) that if people have non-UTF-8-friendly browsers that they 
> should upgrade. That is not the attitude we should have when things work just 
> fine the way they are (at least on the English Wikipedia - others may have 
> more compelling reasons to use UTF-8 that outweigh the negatives). 
> 
> The only place where UTR-8 would be very useful is with interlanguage links. 
> But that could better be solved by placing all interlanguage links outside of 
> the regular wiki text of pages. That separate edit window could support UTF-8 
> and be shared by all Wikipedia's. This should minimize damage done by 
> non-UTF-8-compliant browsers and as an added benefit could be part of an 
> easier way to add language links to articles (inputing the links once would 
> create language links in every article listed in the common meta space).  

1.
There are many reasons other than interwiki. ISO 8859-1  is broken by design -
it doesn't even encode all Latin characters, and other characters are also needed
for correct Latin-script typography.

2.
Things are NOT fine the way they are. At least not for English Wikipedia.

3.
And, as I said, we already break compatibility with very old browsers in many ways.
Or do you maybe want to ban all PNGs, OGGs etc., and implement some converter
from CSS to HTML3-compatible markup ?