Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

In Monobook and other skins, external links are given an icon. However, since there is no special syntax for linking to many things within the wiki, such as diffs, external links have to be used for these. Such links are shown with the external link icon even though they do not, in fact, link to an external site, which is both misleading to the user and untidy when there are lots of links.

On Wikipedia and elsewhere, a "plainlinks" class in the site CSS is used to mitigate this, but this is something of a hack, and having to write <span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:Page_name|diff=123456789}} link]</span> just to link to a diff without the external link icon appearing is a bit of a mouthful.

While this is partly a skin issue, it would help if MediaWiki treated "external" links to the wiki itself differently from other external links, either styling them the same as interwiki links (in Monobook, same colour as external links but no icon) or as a completely new class.