Last modified: 2014-11-17 09:21:27 UTC
Several of the skins use the PDF icon when links to PDF files are in the content. The PDF icon is however a non-free icon, http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html, and thus should probably not be used and shipped in the mediawiki software. A free alternative to the icon has been developed, http://pdfreaders.org/graphics.en.html, but in my opinion, the icon will be more confusing than useful to the readers atm, due to lack of recognizability. A more generic icon might be the best choice for the immediate future.
We should perhaps switch to using icons from the Gnome Desktop icons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Desktop_icons#Mimetypes - which we (the Wikipedia Usability Initiative) have been using for the new wiki editing tools. PDFs could be shown as a document icon.
Marking as INVALID. The PDF icon you are referring to - the one appearing at the end of *.pdf links - was added in Mediawiki:Common.css by the enwiki community (look at the section beginning '#content a[href$=".pdf"].external' ...). The Monobook default for PDFs is a generic document icon and that PDF icon is not included with the Mediawiki software. Beyond that, concerns about the icon should be resolved at enwiki Mediawiki_talk:Common.css or other community pages.