[Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to UTF-8

[Daniel Mayer]

Tomasz wrote:

>1.
>There are many reasons other than interwiki. ISO 8859-1  is 
>broken by design - it doesn't even encode all Latin characters, 
>and other characters are also needed for correct Latin-script 
>typography.  

Oh, which ones? All the Latin characters on my keyboard work just fine. 
Extended Latin characters also work fine. If you want anything more fancy 
then use &code;. 

>2.
>Things are NOT fine the way they are. At least not for English 
>Wikipedia. 

That begs the question. What is wrong? 

>3.
>And, as I said, we already break compatibility with very old 
>browsers in many ways. Or do you maybe want to ban all PNGs, 
>OGGs etc., and implement some converter from CSS to HTML3-
>compatible markup ?   

Come on. Not being able to view PNGs, OGGs, fancy CSS tricks and HTML-3 only 
stuff does not harm any article. However, somebody using an older browser can 
really screw-up an article on at UTF-8 page. This already happens fairly 
often on meta, even though meta has very low traffic compared with 
en.wikipedia. You cannot compare the two. 

UTF-8 is a non-starter for en.wikipedia, and probably for most other 
Latin-based wikis as well. But the choice of charset should be up to each 
wiki and that choice should reflect the needs of that wiki. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)