Last modified: 2014-09-19 02:37:35 UTC
Intention: MediaWiki shows padlock icons next to HTTPS links because a plone developer back in 2003 thought they were cute. Nowadays more and more websites are going HTTPS entirely, and this link decoration is unnecessary clutter. I discussed this here, to figure out why this happens and how to switch them off on my own wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Project:Support_desk/Padlock_icons_on_HTTPS_links._Why%3F_and_how_to_switch_off%3F ...but with this bug I humbly suggest that the default should maybe be changed. Steps to Reproduce: put a HTTPS URL on a wiki page e.g. https://twitter.com/harry_wood and preview/save the page to see how it renders Actual Results: On the default mediawiki vector skin you get a small yellow padlock icon to the right of the link. This is quite visually cluttering, making for unnecessarily ugly wiki pages (and with no security advantage that I can see) Expected Results: The normal 'external link' icon would be better. Or at least we could phase-out the padlock, moving to a more subtle blue padlock as used on wikimedia sites Reproducible: Didn't try
To an inexperienced user the padlock appears to indicate sort of security risk.
I assume this needs a broader discussion and/or consensus on Village Pumps and potentially mediawiki-l@ mailing list.
There was a thread about ALL external link icons on design-l in October 2013, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2013-October/001035.html Old Notes on the "blue padlock replacement" are linked at the bottom of http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2013-October/001039.html (I agree that replacing the yellow-padlock icon with either: the standard external-link icon, or the blue-padlock icon, would be good.) There's a Semi-Related discussion at bug 54604 ("Ridiculous amount of CSS rules for external links")
If I read https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54604 correctly, the padlocks were removed as part of the typography refresh. Shouldn't this bug be closed ?
(In reply to Ash Crow from comment #4) > If I read https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54604 correctly, > the padlocks were removed as part of the typography refresh. Shouldn't this > bug be closed ? Yes. Thank you!
This appears to be OK on mediawiki.org. However, I am still seeing these icons on en.wikipedia.org. This discusses the problem: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/29004/why-does-mediawiki-put-little-padlocks-on-https-links
English Wikipedia editors have decided to add their own little padlocks. See the very bottom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Vector.css . You could probably raise this issue on the discussion of that page.
Thank you Bartosz. I have done just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Vector.css#Padlock_for_secure_links After looking at Vector.css, I think it is misleading to say that English Wikipedia editors have decided to add their own little padlocks. What they did is they *changed* their padlocks.
Padlocks have now been removed from the English Wikipedia.
