Was this ever submitted an update to the `wc` shipped on systems?
"...Now the real wc works with a lot more character-sets, and we don't do that. But by implementing UTF-8, we've shown that it's possible, and that the speed for any character-set is the same."
Looking at the command line options for wc2.c and comparing to the FSF wc man page, it looks like there are some missing/unsupported options in wc2.c as well.
This should read: the real wc works with a lot more character _encodings_