From Wiki

Or, "What's does '^Ae%iX@' mean?"

Several of the pages in this website describe items from countries that, for some reason, stubbornly refuse to use the alphabet you and I grew up with. This may be inconsiderate of them, but if we want world peace in our lifetime, we need to be a little tolerant of the foibles of others. And be a little less provincial. This includes making wise choices in web browsers.

To include characters from other languages, Mediawiki uses the Unicode UTF-8 encoding to do so. UTF-8 is a way to efficiently mix 8-bit and 16-bit characters in the same file, and is an accepted standard for doing so. It is also backwards-compatible with the ASCII and ISO 8859-1 character sets, so pages written in those character sets require no changes.

Mediawiki includes this header line in the page's HTML source:

 <META http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset="UTF-8">

This warns your browser that UTF-8 text is coming at it and to be ready to decode it for you. Of the browsers I've tested, FireFox, Safari, and OmniWeb handle this header correctly. Internet Explorer does not, but you can request UTF-8 decoding manually in the Preferences window (Web Browser, Language/Fonts, set Default Character Set to UTF-8, restart the browser.) Opera should work, and sometimes does for me. It sometimes doesn't, too. I don't use Opera as my day-to-day browser, though, so I don't know what's different.

I know it's "bad customer service" to say "upgrade your browser, already," but if you see ^Ae%iX@ or something like it on your pages, well, upgrade your browser already!