Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-5068292-20150124035050/@comment-7697305-20150124071112

One potential solution would be to use the   parser to determine whether there is a page in the file namespace with the specified title.

As a simple example, something like the following: ...would parse the input as an internal link if "File: " exists and as an external file (dependent on MediaWiki:External image whitelist) if it doesn't.

However, it is worth mentioning that this is not a perfect solution as, depending on the number of cases in which the title does not exist, this method can pretty easily flood Special:WantedFiles. Additionally, this parser can only be used a certain number of times per page.