Editing Help:Special characters (section)

== What character encoding does Wikipedia use? ==
From MediaWiki 1.5, all projects use '''[[w:Unicode|Unicode]] ([[w:UTF-8|UTF-8]])''' [[w:character encoding|character encoding]].
Until the end of June 2005, when this new version came into use on Wikimedia projects, the English, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish Wikipedias used [[w:Windows-1252|Windows-1252]] (they declared themselves to be [[w:ISO-8859-1|ISO-8859-1]] but in reality browsers treat the two as synonymous and the MediaWiki software made no attempt to prevent use of characters exclusive to windows-1252). Pre-upgrade wikitext in their databases remains stored in Windows-1252 and is converted on load (some of it may also have been converted by gradual changes in the way history is stored). Edits made since the upgrade will be stored as UTF-8 in the database. This conversion on load process is invisible to users. It is also invisible to reusers as Wikimedia now uses [[m:Data dumps/FAQ#What happened to the SQL dumps?|XML dumps rather than database dumps]].
;Unicode (UTF-8)
:*a variable number of bytes per character
:*special characters, including [[w:CJK|CJK]] characters, can be treated like normal ones; not only the webpage, but also the edit box shows the character; in addition it is possible to use the multi-character codes; they are not automatically converted in the edit box.
;ISO 8859-1
:*one byte per character
:*special characters that are not available in the limited character set are stored in the form of a multi-character code; there are usually two or three equivalent representations, e.g. for the character € the '''named character reference''' <code>&amp;euro;</code> and the '''decimal character reference''' <code>&amp;#8364;</code> and the '''hexadecimal character reference''' <code>&amp;#x20AC;</code>. The edit box shows the entered code, the webpage the resulting character. Unavailable characters which are copied into the edit box are first displayed as the character, and [[Help:Automatic conversion of wikitext|automatically converted]] to their decimal codes on Preview or Publish changes.
:*the most common special characters, such as é, are in the character set, so code like <code>&amp;eacute;</code>, although allowed, is not needed.
Note that Special:Export exports using UTF-8 even if the database is encoded in ISO 8859-1, at least that was the case for the English Wikipedia, already when it used version 1.4.
To find out which character set applies in a project, use the browser's "View Source" feature and look for something like this:
:<code><meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/></code>
or
:<code><meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/></code>