Ancient character encoding used on some wikis causes fatal exceptions and forces sysadmin actions

[Bbb23sucks]

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337700

[ericbarbour]

Judging from the history below it, MediaWiki has suffered from this problem (and similar ones) for a long time. Thanks to their tendency to be lazy in the early days and not follow standard programming practices. There are mentions like "It has content with windows-1252 encoding, a very old legacy one (before UTF-8 was adapted in the wiki) leading to all sorts of complications on edits from old times like 2004 to 2005".

Whatever characters are involved seem to be used in Scandinavian languages.

[Bbb23sucks]

It appears that a related issue resulted in an outage on Danish Wikipedia and others for over three hours.