It's been discussed many times and it's not a feature that is ever intended to be included. Using target="_blank" forces the user to view a link in a new window/tab. This may not always be what the user wants, in fact while there are links you think are best if opened in a new window/tab, some users may not want them to and will be discouraged from using your site because that action is forced upon them. With modern browsers any user can simply use a easy key that their browser uses if they wish to open a link in a new window. In Firefox it's as simple as holding down the CTRL key and clicking, and 90% of other modern browsers use a similar action, perhaps with a different key. So because the user can by default pick what they want easily, and adding a _blank to it will make it open in a new window/tab even if they don't want it to. It was decided to not include that ability.

~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of: -The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com) -Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG) -and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)

Marko Milisavljevic wrote:

A quick search through MediaWiki source files reveals that it only uses target="_blank" in 2 places: when previewing a skin, and when clicking on creative commons license. If wikitext links could be specified with _blank target, there would probably be some other occurence of _blank in source code.

On 10/31/07, Vielevisels kaivi@arcor.de wrote:

...

Hi, is it possible to open a new explorer window or a new tab by clicking on a link? Links both of the content (e.g. links in articles) and mediawiki itself (e.g. Spezialpages)? Kai _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

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