Could you help me figure out what's happening with [[человек]]?

So it's actually generating [[человек#Russian|челове́к]]<sup>*</sup> and the links module is somehow getting confused and surrounding the whole thing with a self-link. The underlying wikimedia code doesn't display links well if there is a < in the left side of the link, which is why the weird display happens.

Yeah, the software doesn't allow html inside links.

I fixed the issue (see Talk:человек#Self-link with asterisk in headword line).