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'_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