Thread:Project:Support desk/Page Titles with Special Characters not decoding properly 1.16.2 - 1.17.0/reply (3)

Probably not. I think the html5 people did a bit of testing and found that most browsers already supported it. Additionally, web browsers are supposed to only look at meta tags if there are no http headers. What seems more likely is that the webserver is sending the wrong content-type header, which overrides the tags.

If you do want to rule out the meta tag though, you could do  in LocalSettings.php - which will cause it to use the older style meta tags (along with disabling other html5 related things).