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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T06:53:10+00:00

When I upload a file onto mediawiki with Special Characters in the name it

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When I upload a file onto mediawiki with Special Characters in the name it mangles the filename into something that looks like this:

Waterford_(Dáil_Éireann_constituency).png

when it actually writes it to the file when it should actually look like this:

Waterford_(Dáil_Éireann_constituency).png

Which means that when another page links to that file it comes up as a broken image link because it’s looking for

http://mysite.com/wiki/images/Waterford_(Dáil_Éireann_constituency).png

I don’t want to prevent people from using special characters as often they copy the files from wikipedia which supports special characters, and I think it’s something to do with the way my host handles files.
So it would be preferable if there was some way to intercept the way that mediawiki creates the files so that the filepath would be free from special characters while all the references would still work.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    MediaWiki is 100% UTF-8 safe, but something somewhere in your Apache/PHP configuration is mangling UTF-8 into ISO 8859-1 (Latin1). Start by making sure your PHP install has mbstring enabled as specified here:

    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/PHP_configuration

    If you’re stuck with a messed-up host, then this Talk page has some clues for stabbing your Wiki with a knife to make it dumb down filenames:

    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:Configuring_file_uploads#Image_File_Names

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