Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

You can get this behavior by putting this in your User:username/monobook.js:

window.onload=replaceLinks;
function replaceLinks() {
  var x,i; 
  x=document.links; 
  for(i=0;i<x.length;++i) { 
    if(x[i].className=='external text') {
      x[i].target="_blank"; 
    } 
  }
}

(Be sure to clean your cache after changing your user script or it won't take
effect.)

I hope this will not be included in MediaWiki because this is not html-compatible.

This feature was one I wanted when I first noticed wikipedia in early 2005. I
think it would be an enhancement. 

You can always open links in a new window from the browser, 
quite easily. There's no particular reason to discriminate 
automatically based on how the link was generated.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1055 ***

*** Bug 9811 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***