Tomasz wrote:
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.
Oh, which ones? All the Latin characters on my keyboard work just fine.
Extended Latin characters also work fine. If you want anything more fancy
then use &code;.
2.
Things are NOT fine the way they are. At least not for English
Wikipedia.
That begs the question. What is wrong?
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 ?
Come on. Not being able to view PNGs, OGGs, fancy CSS tricks and HTML-3 only
stuff does not harm any article. However, somebody using an older browser can
really screw-up an article on at UTF-8 page. This already happens fairly
often on meta, even though meta has very low traffic compared with
en.wikipedia. You cannot compare the two.
UTF-8 is a non-starter for en.wikipedia, and probably for most other
Latin-based wikis as well. But the choice of charset should be up to each
wiki and that choice should reflect the needs of that wiki.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)