[Mediawiki-l] RPED extension "1267: Illegal mix of collations" error

[Tisane .]

I am encountering an error with Extension:RPED on pages that have characters
from certain alphabets. My server (I have shared hosting) is running PHP
5.2.13. I found this post about a situation with a similar error:
http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?13824-mysql-error-1271-Illegal-mix-of-collations-for-operation-IN

I am the author of the RPED extension and am wondering if this is an issue
for me to fix, or if it is an issue with PHP that will need to be fixed with
a later upgrade of PHP? The error occurs at, for instance:
* http://libertapedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox
* http://libertapedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barack_Obama&oldid=20752

The line of code in RPED where it is messing up is:

$result=$dbr->selectRow('rped_page','rped_page_id',array("rped_page_title"
=> $title));

The error is as follows:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the
software. The last attempted database query was:

SELECT rped_page_id FROM `rped_page` WHERE rped_page_title =
'Ar:قالب:قالب_معلومات' LIMIT 1

from within function "Database::selectRow". Database returned error "1267:
Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and
(utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '=' (localhost)".

Thanks, -Tisane