Help:Plainlinks

What plainlinks does

Some MediaWiki skins show an icon after external links to distinguish them from links within the wiki. The CSS class plainlinks can suppress that decoration in supported contexts. It does not make an external destination internal, remove the URL, or change the link's permissions or safety. Theme and site configuration affect the result.

A typical use around an external link is:

<span class="plainlinks">[https://example.org External source]</span>

Use this only when the icon is disruptive to a specific layout, such as a carefully designed inline control. For normal article prose, keep the site's standard external-link treatment so readers can recognise off-site destinations.

Do not hide destinations

Do not use plainlinks to disguise where a link goes or make an external link look like an ordinary internal wikilink when that distinction matters. Use descriptive link text and cite sources as described in Project:Citing sources. If the class has no visible effect, do not add more styling blindly; the skin may implement external-link icons differently.