...

We'd love to, but we need to either a) take it offline for a

few days or

...

b) invent a way to convert the database without data loss or damage while keeping it online.

-- brion vibber (brino @ pobox.com)

I suppose most of the time will be taken to convert old. Shouldn't be possible to convert only cur while either leave old unconvert or mark each entrey in old as unconverted/still in iso-8859-1 and convert these entries when they are needed or by a very low priority job? (of course the soft will need to handle the conversion flag when viewing on old version of an article, doing a diff, ...)

Is this doable or still too complex?

It's possible. Just need to change a bit the software :) Just need to add a flag UTF-8 as the soft add a flag gzip. And tell the soft to read as it is.

Shaihulud