UTF-8 and latin1

[Tobiah]

I get data from various sources; client emails, spreadsheets, and
data from web applications.  I find that I can do some_string.decode('latin1')
to get unicode that I can use with xlsxwriter,
or put <meta charset="latin1"> in the header of a web page to display
European characters correctly.  But normally UTF-8 is recommended as
the encoding to use today.  latin1 works correctly more often when I
am using data from the wild.  It's frustrating that I have to play
a guessing game to figure out how to use incoming text.   I'm just wondering
if there are any thoughts.  What if we just globally decided to use utf-8?
Could that ever happen?