I think the information in the patch should go in the urlopen doc, not in urlencode. Adding a note to urlencode that says that the result must be encoded is fine, but all the details about the default encoding and the fact that an extra Content-Type header is necessary when the encoding is not iso-8859-1 belong to the urlopen doc IMHO. (Is the header actually necessary? I think I always sent utf-8 without header, and the example you added in r88394 also uses utf-8 with no extra headers.)
There are also a few minor issues with the patch -- I'll leave a note in rietveld for that.