If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.

This is a totally wrong-headed way to look at things. Most net users have out-of-date browsers and we shouldn't expect them to upgrade to the latest version of their browser just to write articles. /Very/ unWiki.

The only major issue I see with UTF support deals with interlanguage links but there are already plans being worked-out to have these links outside the main content window of articles. Therefore the main content window can be in the charset that is best for that particular language Wikipedia and the interlanguage link edit window can be in UTF.

Most browsers can deal with Latin-charset-based accent marks so this isn't such a big issue anymore. BTW everyone should be writing in the language of their Wikipedia. French articles should be in French, English articles in English, Spanish articles in Spanish (unless most common usage of the term is to use the foreign spelling). Yes this means that the titles of articles are often approximated to fit within the language you are writing when the two languages have different alphabets. Most important terms have more or less widely-used latin-based approximations. All the less important terms have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Wiktionary is UTF though (and rightly so since all words in all languages are the subjects of articles). In the encyclopedias, however, the subjects are not the words, but persons, places, things and ideas (the names are for indexing purposes only - so that the information about the subjects can be found by the target audience). So providing access to your target audience is more important than using a zillion different alphabets (just how the subject's name looks in another language can be expressed in the article using Unicode).

In short, for now at least, the benefits of using UTF for Latin-based Wikipedias are over-shadowed by the negative repercussions.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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