Tomasz wrote:

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;.

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

That begs the question. What is wrong?

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)