Free_Links
You can now force a link over arbitrary text by putting it in brackets, like this: Alabama.
Also, something I just now learned from reading the source code, you can link to ISBN's like this: ISBN: 0887308856
I am all for consistency. We should henceforth use free linking. We should also get the above question answered...that could save us a lot of mind-numbing gruntwork. -- Larry Sanger
Why doesn't my Free Links work correctly. Is it because they contain non-ASCII characters? Look at Sweden for Göteborg and Malmö.
Fixing the non-ASCII character problem should be relatively easy. A similar problem has already been solved in the world of IMAP in the i18n of mailbox names, and the solution was to use modified UTF-7 encoding. For a complete explanation, please see RFC 2060, section 5.1.3. The short version is that M-UTF-7 uses US-ASCII representation for US-ASCII characters, and "shifts" into modified BASE 64 for all other charsets (UNICODE 16-bit octets).
Although I don't have a library routine I can whip out for you, I'm sure you can find one somewhere to hack up for WikiPedia. - Flavor
See WikiPediaBugs for more.