Talk:Mojibake

Sections requiring more citations

• Etymology
• Causes
• Underspecification
• Mis-specification
• Overspecification
• Lack of hardware/software support
• Resolutions
• English
• Other Western European languages
• Central and Eastern European
• Examples
• Polish
• Russian and other Cyrillic languages
• Yugoslav languages
• Caucasian languages
• Asian encodings
• Japanese
• Chinese
• African languages
• Arabic

As you can see, nearly every single section of the article is lacking in citations, making it woefully under-referenced. Please do not remove maintenance tags unless you have already performed the work necessary to bring the article in compliance with policy, in this case WP:RS and WP:V. Elizium23 (talk) 00:55, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Link farm from EL

I've removed these from the External links section as most of them seem to be more advertising services or tools than anything else. We can discuss which might be appropriate to add back to the section.

1. Avoiding Mojibake - Reprinted article from the Japan Times
2. Coldfusion Developers Guide article
3. Online decoder of Hebrew text – Online decoder converts input into readable Hebrew text
4. Translators guide
5. Recovery tool – Recovery of Japanese text (in Japanese)
6. Chinese E-mail Fixer – Recovery of Chinese text
7. Chinese Encoding Converter - Convert file encoding of text files
8. Decodr.ru - Fast Cyrillic decoder of e-mail and charsets
9. Universal Cyrillic decoder – Recovery of Cyrillic (and other) text
10. Multilingual online text decoder – Online decoder converts scrambled input into readable text. Supported languages are Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew and Thai.
11. Noto pri ĉapeloj: Resuma tabelo – Covers most cases of Esperanto mojibake.
12. Encoding Repair Kit – Fixes mojibake, originally intended for Japanese. Windows freeware, 1998. Not compatible with Windows Vista or 7.
13. Krzaki krzaki krzaki – Online decoder for Polish mojibake cases.
14. No Such Thing As Plain Text – Developers' Guide for A Better Handling of Text Encoding
15. Padma: Transformer for Indic Scripts – source code is on GitHub
16. ftfy – Python library that "fixes Unicode that's broken in various ways".
17. Vietnamese Conversions – online tool for recovering Vietnamese mojibake

When discussing a particular link, please use the number to make sure people know which one it is. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 00:13, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

pronunciation?

I assume this word has four syllables. Would it be correct to adjust the listed pronunciation to "IPA: [mo.d͡ʑi.ba.ke]"? scs (talk) 12:20, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Seems to right. See: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mojibake#Pronunciation 85.115.28.158 (talk) 07:32, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

"Unintelligible sequence of characters" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Unintelligible sequence of characters has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 May 6 § Unintelligible sequence of characters until a consensus is reached. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 13:21, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Develop a bot to correctly hyphenate words modifying a noun?

Developing a bot to identify and correct words which act as modifiers of nouns--which should be hyphenated--may be difficult or easy--I have no idea. But it should be looked into, I think. 83.48.52.212 (talk) 20:50, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

This is not the place for that discussion. Try WP:Bot requests or WP:Village pump (idea lab), although I suspect it would ultimately be rejected due to being too context-sensitive for a bot to reliably handle. You may also want to review MOS:HYPHEN, which appears to disagree with at least Special:Diff/1302171275. Anomie⚔ 12:17, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

backasswards

i lived in japan for eons, and my local friends all say "bakemoji", not "mojibake". is that a slang thing?

can a native speaker confirm the existence of the reverse term? ~2026-13473-36 (talk) 18:17, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

Restructuring Section 3 for encyclopedic tone and technical clarity

The current state of Section 3 ('Problems in different writing systems') is inconsistent with WP:NOTMANUAL and WP:PROSE. Instead of explaining the technical nature of encoding failures, it has devolved into an exhaustive directory of repetitive tables.

Proposed changes:

• Shift from examples to mechanisms: Replace redundant tables with prose explaining whyspecific scripts (multi-byte, right-to-left, etc.) fail under certain conditions. An encyclopedia should focus on the underlying technical causes, not just document every possible symptom.
• Remove redundant data: Streamline the regional sections (Arabic, Vietnamese, Central European) by removing excessive visual noise. One or two illustrative examples are sufficient to support the text; twenty rows of garbled text add no new encyclopedic value.
• Maintain historical context: Keep the unique technical cases like KOI8-R or Shift-JIS, but rewrite them to prioritize technical analysis over raw data lists.

The goal is to restore a professional, encyclopedic style to the article. Please share your thoughts if you have concerns regarding this cleanup. Thank you, Astra.L Astra.L (talk) 12:14, 25 April 2026 (UTC)