ayg wrote:

Because the auto-linking feature of whatever software you're using strips the trailing period. What are we supposed to do here, automatically redirect to a page with a trailing period? That's probably a good idea. We also might want to handle the opposite case, where a question mark or bracket or something is added to the URL by the auto-linking software.

ayg wrote:

(Note that you can work around the specific case by just manually creating [[Hamlet A.D.D]] and redirecting it to [[Hamlet A.D.D.]].)

(In reply to comment #1)

What are we supposed to do here, automatically redirect to a
page with a trailing period? That's probably a good idea. We also might want
to handle the opposite case, where a question mark or bracket or something is
added to the URL by the auto-linking software.

You're joking, right?

ayg wrote:

No, I'm not. If the user goes to a page that doesn't exist, check for similar-looking page names, and if you find a plausible match do a redirect. You'd probably want to make it like a normal redirect, not an HTTP redirect, because otherwise you'd have trouble creating the page if you want it to contain something different.

What's wrong with this approach? Specifically, given that there's no way to stop these bogus autolinks from existing, do you have a solution with a better cost/benefit ratio? On a website I run, I noticed a lot of 404s were due to bogus trailing punctuation (the opposite problem to the one seen here).

Might make sense as an extension, perhaps combined with more general autoredirection, e.g. from titles with different letter case. (That could mostly solve bug 453.)

This general problem affects me almost daily.
It is usually from links within emails, especially when the linked page has Section Headers that include a ? (question mark).
E.g. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Cloud_Services_Terms_of_use#What_uses_of_Cloud_Services_do_we_not_like? (which even breaks in phabricator)

I have some old (2007!) notes on the problem at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Quiddity/Problems_with_punctuation_in_links

Painful workaround: I continuously have to remember to manually replace ? with %3F every time I write an email, or send a link off-wiki in another way.

Also: I think this task might be a duplicate-with T40265: Links in emails: Parentheses ( or ) not recognized as part of URL - brackets should be URL-encoded - But I'm not sure which direction to merge (and any title/description overhauls to make the problem clearer).