+1 for more discussion, and onwiki discussion to find out why we/they've each kept them in the individual CSS payloads for so many years...

On 10/24/2013 02:48 PM, Jared Zimmerman wrote:

Its definitely a less heavy handed way of doing the thing many (annoying) sites do when they warn you that you're leaving their site. I just wonder is the signal to noise it worth it. I don't know that modern web users have any expectations that link within a site always point to local site urls.

Wikis are special, in relation to most sites, because of the density of internal links (many per paragraph), and the expectation that most links are internal and will lead to a similar quality/style of information. That applies from Wikisource, to Wookiepedia.

In wikis that don't mix external links in the main content (eg most Wikipedias), the icons are also useful for editors as they can easily notice that something needs to be moved/fixed.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:External_link_icons for a good list of what the English Wikipedia has.

See also recent discussion at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54604 ("Ridiculous amount of CSS rules for external links")

The only icon that seems (afaik) completely unnecessary, and bright/distracting, is the https padlock, which possibly could/should be replaced with the standard external link icon. (Unless there's a rationale for it that I'm forgetting/unaware of.)

See this 2009 discussion where Davidgothberg created a blue (less distracting) replacement, if we need to keep a padlock for some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Common.css/Archive_11#Secure_links_padlock
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/60320

HTH. Quiddity