diff --git a/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/parsers.py b/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/parsers.py
index 750e917..59b5958 100644
--- a/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/parsers.py
+++ b/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/parsers.py
@@ -29,7 +29,8 @@ from earwigbot import importer
 bs4 = importer.new("bs4")
 nltk = importer.new("nltk")
 
-__all__ = ["BaseTextParser", "ArticleTextParser", "HTMLTextParser"]
+__all__ = ["BaseTextParser", "ArticleTextParser", "HTMLTextParser",
+           "PlainTextParser"]
 
 class BaseTextParser(object):
     """Base class for a parser that handles text."""
@@ -157,7 +158,7 @@ class HTMLTextParser(BaseTextParser):
         "script", "style"
     ]
 
-    def strip(self):
+    def parse(self):
         """Return the actual text contained within an HTML document.
 
         Implemented using :py:mod:`BeautifulSoup <bs4>`
@@ -180,3 +181,11 @@ class HTMLTextParser(BaseTextParser):
                 element.extract()
 
         return "\n".join(soup.stripped_strings)
+
+
+class PlainTextParser(BaseTextParser):
+    """A parser that can unicode-ify and strip text from a plain text page."""
+
+    def parse(self):
+        """Unicode-ify and strip whitespace from the plain text document."""
+        return bs4.UnicodeDammit(self.text).unicode_markup.strip()
diff --git a/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/workers.py b/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/workers.py
index 4faed75..ffd5510 100644
--- a/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/workers.py
+++ b/earwigbot/wiki/copyvios/workers.py
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ from urllib2 import build_opener, URLError
 
 from earwigbot import importer
 from earwigbot.wiki.copyvios.markov import MarkovChain, MarkovChainIntersection
-from earwigbot.wiki.copyvios.parsers import HTMLTextParser
+from earwigbot.wiki.copyvios.parsers import HTMLTextParser, PlainTextParser
 from earwigbot.wiki.copyvios.result import CopyvioCheckResult, CopyvioSource
 
 tldextract = importer.new("tldextract")
@@ -139,9 +139,9 @@ class _CopyvioWorker(object):
         ctype_full = response.headers.get("Content-Type", "text/plain")
         ctype = ctype_full.split(";", 1)[0]
         if ctype in ["text/html", "application/xhtml+xml"]:
-            handler = lambda res: HTMLTextParser(res).strip()
+            handler = HTMLTextParser
         elif ctype == "text/plain":
-            handler = lambda res: res.strip()
+            handler = PlainTextParser
         else:
             return None
 
@@ -158,7 +158,7 @@ class _CopyvioWorker(object):
             except (IOError, struct_error):
                 return None
 
-        return handler(content)
+        return handler(content).parse()
 
     def _acquire_new_site(self):
         """Block for a new unassigned site queue."""
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 5efa620..23be139 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ extra_deps = {
     ],
     "copyvios": [
         "beautifulsoup4 >= 4.1.1",  # Parsing/scraping HTML
+        "cchardet >= 0.3.5",  # Encoding detection for BeautifulSoup
         "lxml >= 2.3.5",  # Faster parser for BeautifulSoup
         "nltk >= 2.0.2",  # Parsing sentences to split article content
         "oauth2 >= 1.5.211",  # Interfacing with Yahoo! BOSS Search