On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 04:39:51AM -0800, Anthere wrote:

...

4. move everything to UTF-8, so we don't have to use

%escapes in English Wikipedia

I would appreciate very much that you explain to me very clearly what will be the benefits of switching to UTF 8. I have no idea, and it must be important if you think of moving everything this way.

As I understood, meta is coded in UTF-8.

I'll be very clear why this is an important matter to me : if you move everything to UTF-8, I will just quit Wikipedia.

The only place I can write properly on the meta is from work (W2k and IE). And my boss doesn't appreciate that much.

At home, I can't write any special characters; and if I edit a page with some (for exemple "accueil" our home page), I mess everything. It is a matte of importance in french language.

Opera doesn't support UTF. Netscape doesn't support some of our characters either, and is all crazy with the frames (tool bar unusable). And from time to time, IE refuse to edit long windows (it doesnot cut them as Opera does, it just displays the visible part of the edit window, the scrollbar just disappears). And Mozilla is not working well, and real slow. So the easiest way to me is to write with no accents. And never edit pages with special characters.

Opera, Mozilla, IE, Netscape and Konqueror ALL SUPPORT UTF-8. I have used them all to edit Polish Wikipedia (which is UTF-8) and had never any problems about that.

Opera has broken charset autodetection, you may wish to play with settings a bit.

Other problems you describe have nothing to do with UTF-8.

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

I can't find a really satisfying option. It is not a huge problem on meta. But it definitly would make working on wikipedia articles a real pain. So please, explain what the real benefits are, and don't make the switch just a minor issue. At least on the french one. It won't be so bad on the english one, for you don't use special characters much, but likely many people will have to correct things after me. So, maybe I'll give up participating on the en.wiki.

One reason are Interwiki links, which now must be coded by %-sequences, and making en->pl links is very inconvenient, especially when using konqueror, which displays normal characters, not %-sequences in URL bar.

But the really important one is that we really need characters outside ISO-8859-1.

How can I write article about any Polish city if I can't write half of Polish diactrics ? The same applies to most of central Europe, and to most romanizations schemes of other scripts (which use lot of diactrics). How can I write any article about people from such places ? Engish Wikipedia screws this issue completely by stripping essential diactrics (like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Walesa).

How can I write article about some language that doesn't use ISO-8859-1 (that's some 90% of world languages) ? Polish Wikipedia contains more linguistic information than English now, mostly because you can't do any decent linguistics without using native scripts. Even if I wanted to translate Polish articles to English, I wouldn't be able to put them on English Wikipedia.