[Mediawiki-l] Character encoding on the database

[Fernando Correia]

I'm new to MediaWiki and I'd like some help about character encoding.

I followed the MediaWiki installation instructions I was able to find on the
Web. They said to use latin-1 encoding on MySQL.

MediaWiki actually works with this configuration. But there is a strange
behavior.

If I open the table in the MySQL administration tool, the accented
characters do not display correctly. They seem to be stored in some other
encoding. Maybe UTF-8?

If I insert data on the table using another program, the accented characters
look good in the MySQL administration tool, but don't display correctly in
MediaWiki.

It seems that although the database is using latin-1 encoding, MediaWiki is
internally using some other.

I'm concerned about two things:
1. That MediaWiki encoding will conflict with MySQL encoding and some
corruption may occur.
2. That I will not be able to insert data on the tables using programs that
I write. I need to do this to fill the user table.

I will appreciate any help about this.

Thanks!