It seemed that the issue was incorrectly diagnosed, and MediaWiki or Wikipedia was being blamed for the error, and that you had also proposed a rather strange workaround for it. The issue could be solved completely within the context of Hacker News post markup, as linked.

If you put a hashtag at the end of a Wikipedia URL, then I suppose it works, until the URL already has a hashtag in it, because these are used for section headings. It's not called "escaping" anything, it's just... an empty URI fragment: a link to the top of the article?

There is also nothing preventing a Wikipedia editor from creating a redirect from the title y'all linked. In fact it's a perfectly fine idea for a redirect. The fact is that the canonical title is in US English, and in US English, "Inc." takes a period as an abbreviation.

There's nothing wrong with your workaround or your percent-encodings to escape some dubious glyph, but I hoped to clarify things and derail the thread further on pedantic technicalities. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.