Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-45310000-20200418011510/@comment-9605025-20200418225823

That is because the file page and the file are different things. MediaWiki does not allow you to directly access the file's data. When you link/transclude "File:ImageName.ext", you are linking/transcluding the page, not the file itself. The parser differentiates between file, category, and "other" links. If it is a file link, it displays the file in whatever manner is deemed appropriate. That is why you need to prefix links with ":" is you want an actually link to a file page.

It is a similar situation with categories. A category and a category page are two different things. In order to link to a category instead of adding the page to the category, you need to prefix the link with ":".