Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 1 (section)

== Character coding in different Wikis ==

I run into a problem with character coding, moving names from Polish Wiki to English. They look ok at first, but next edit shows the letters like &#261;, &#281;, etc. have been corrupted into meaningless strings @#%#% and such. I wonder, y does it work on PL Wiki, not here? The letters should be visible in UTF...or what does Wiki use? Is there just no point in using non-standard letters in EnWiki?
See names in tables on those pages:
Hetman on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetman enWiki] [http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetman plWiki]
Tnx in advance (umm, and major tnx if u can copy your reply to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Piotrus my talk page]!
--[[User:Piotrus|Piotrus]] 16:43, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

:The Polish Wikipedia transmits and receives data in [[UTF-8]], so you can enter any [[Unicode]] character.  The English Wikipedia uses [[ISO 8859-1]], which includes only the characters needed for Western European languages.  So if you want to put Polish letters in the English Wikipedia, you have to convert them to HTML character entity references.  For example, you'll have to turn "&#261;" into &amp;#261;.

:Many people think that the English Wikipedia should use UTF-8.  See the disccussion at [[Wikipedia:Unicode]]. [[User:Gdr|Gdr]] 17:23, 2004 Apr 29 (UTC)