I wonder whether inserting underscores or asterisks, frequently used in search as a wildcard character, into words will cause archive indexing/retrieval problems down the line. I'm asking seriously, not flippantly, here.
I'd guess not, as anything that would store these new words is probably storing longer text strings, and thus already would need to be dealing with escapes properly. Unlike names, these words won't be keys terribly often.
A "word character" class in regex would have to include an asterisk to match something like "Künstler*in".