[Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to UTF-8

[Daniel Mayer]

Peter Gervai wrote:
>Could you point us to the page and revision of the problem? 

couple examples:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org&diff=4613&oldid=4612
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&diff=20132&oldid=20130

This happens on meta's Main Page often. Ask Anthere and Erik for other 
examples. 

>I'm curious what kind of problem it might have been, as many 
>of the Wikipedias are in UTF-8 from the start, and we had no 
>problem whatsoever.  

Probably because their browsers work nicely in UTF-8 because they have to. If 
they didn't they would be useless for any language where UTF-8 is required. 
In places where UTF-8 isn't required, browsers that can't support it tend to 
slip by without being fixed or upgraded. If it ain't broke... 

>However we *do* have problems with english wikipedia when 
>pages contain unrepresentable literal characters, which makes 
>the page break after editing. See "Budapest" article on wikitravel, 
>where every special dash and curly quote marks became question 
>marks. Truly ugly. 

I don't understand. Is Wikitravel in UTF-8? 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)