Provide a link scheme for short, footnote-like external links.
We currently have several link schemes for links pointing to external resources, basically
http://www.example.com
for the raw URL, and
[http://www.example.com RfC2606]
for a named link. (For more link schemes see SyntaxReference.)
Sometimes you don't want to have all the long URL in your text, but you don't want to make a specific word, or the whole sentence a link, either. You just want to provide links to one or more sources for what you said, just like footnotes. E.g.:
OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office suite.
Now assume you want to give a link to an official project web page, where anybody can check your statement, which solution for a link would you prefer?
OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office suite, see http://www.openoffice.org/product/suite.html.
OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office '''suite'''.
OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office suite (source).
- The first solution is ugly and makes the text difficult to read.
Second solution - upps, no markup allowed in links, too bad. However, your intention was not to provide an explanation for the word office suite, you wanted to give a reference for your statement.
- So, the third solution would do the job, but it is not very convenient.
Proposed solution:
Introduce an URL link scheme that creates automatically footnote-like links, alike:
OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office suite. 1
Where the number is a counter automatically set by the wiki engine, i.e. the second occurrence of a link of that type would read 2, the third 3, and so on.
We could recycle the following link scheme for that job:
[http://www.example.com]
which currently renders exactly like
http://www.example.com
so that
[http://www.example.com]
would be rendered as
[1] (but as a link)
while
http://www.example.com
continues to be rendered as
I have to admit that this feature is already implemented in MediaWiki - but who says competition is bad? 
- I just realized that the Usemod wiki engine has exactly the same feature, with exactly the same syntax as proposed here. Now we have to implement it. 
Note that the GUI editor is currently destroying this kind of link syntax, i.e. a source code like [http://www.example.net] will be altered into http://www.example.net when opening the page in the GUI editor.