Git-mediawiki : Encoding problems in perl

Hi,
While working on the git-mediawiki project[1], we ran into some
problems regarding utf8 encoding of files. Most of them have been
solved, however, one is still pretty annoying.
Let me illustrate it :

I want to edit a page on mediawiki using the API, with a very simple example :

my $mw = MediaWiki::API->new();
$mw->edit( {
        action => 'edit',
        title => 'Main_page',
        text => 'été',
} ) ;

But, when I look at the page on mediawiki, I see weird characters : été.

I tried text => encode_utf8('été') with no success.

This makes pushing changes from git to mediawiki buggy since pulling a
file with accentuated characters and pushing it right after changes
things on the wiki.

While googling (a lot), I found that utf8 was pretty tricky in perl...
The only thing that seems to solve things is a simple addition of 'use
encoding utf8' at the top of our script.
However
A) Adding this line requires that I remove 'use strict;'
B) I found some information about this pragma encoding and it seems to
be unadvised to use it

Do you have any information regarding this issue ?

Thanks,
-- 
Jérémie Nikaes
[1] https://github.com/Bibzball/Git-Mediawiki