On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 12:45:58 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote: Specifically, non-latin1 characters seem to have been converted at some stage into what seem to be "FFFD replacement characters" (Mozilla on Linux displays missing glyphs as a square of hex digits; wherever umlauted letters should be, it's showing me | F F | | F F | | F D | | F D | ) This is (according to Brion at http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/821) a character used by software as a placeholder for unrecognised characters. Probably either in downloading or editing the LanguageDe file, some piece of software has mangled it, and therefore the UI messages in it. You could either: a) re-download the file, and run maintenance/rebuildMessages.php [I think that's the one] to build the correct version back into your database; or b) go through all the messages in your MediaWiki: namespace, replacing the broken characters with what they should be ([[Spezial:Allmessages]] should aid you in this task). I was able to enter letters with umlauts in a normal page fine: I took the liberty of trying at http://www.italien.ch/wiki/index.php/Italien.ch:Sandbox -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:13:50 -0500, Jamie Bliss <astronouth7303(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, you misunderstand: the characters are clearly corrupted *in your database*. I was able to add un-corrupted letters with umlauts with no problem at all, as can be seen at http://www.italien.ch/wiki/index.php/Italien.ch:Sandbox How the corrupted characters are displayed (or even how they are transmitted) doesn't matter, they simply need replacing in the database with what they should have been in the first place. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]