Switching everything to UTF-8 - Wikipedia-l

18 Nov 2003

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).  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)