Eric K wrote:

On many online systems (email interfaces, forums, social networks, CMS's), URLs with brackets and apostrophes break very often. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stayin%27_Alive If this URL is posted to Facebook, Facebook will render the URL link as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stayin Similarly links with brackets will break on different systems. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian) This doesnt break on Facebook but it breaks in this very Yahoo email interface that I'm using right now (their HTML editor) and it renders the link as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian

So its a very common problem and because there are so many page titles with these characters, there are likely thousands of links that break every day from Wikipedia, other wikis and other websites.

We know ofcourse its not the fault of Mediawiki because this is a URL-related problem that falls under the responsibility of the people who program the interfaces that produce the links, but - what can be done about this?

A few times I've contacted the systems to let them know they should take care of links with apostrophes and brackets but there's just too many systems and sadly, they dont follow any kinds of standards when it comes to URL link rendering, and they do their own thing.

Erik

You could also provide as link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew%20Roberts%20%28historian%29 but it's much uglier. That's why mediawiki tries to not encode them. You can of course change that for your install. Also note that on enwiki they have an ugly hack to provide a "Did you mean" offering you to close the bracket on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian

It's also browser-dependant, since modern Firefox will copy the url as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_%28historian%29