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However, as Nuria mentioned, consistency with Mediawiki may be safest if we expect that client packages will continue >to have encoding challenges. Also cross-db/charset joins to be considered.
My last reply on this thread, I promise. As I have come to learn as of late (encoding in python 2.7 is a world of joy), having the right encoding in python while using sqlalchemy has a lot to do on "how" you connect to the db.
If we use VARBINARY types we also need to connect either by specifying convert_unicode=True or with connect_args={"charset" : "utf8"}
In the second case (specifying the charset) while our db types are VARBINARY the sql alchemy column types can be strings and everything is happy, this seems like the easiest solution.