A related problem is, when you change only the first character of a link, that first letter is no longer part of the link. For example, if you change [[edinburgh]] to [[Edinburgh]], it becomes E[[dinburgh]].

I agree that this behaviour is not great for users; we should reverse the decision to abandon "pre-annotation" (that is, if you're typing, we'll apply the same formatting as the character immediately before the one you've just typed in the same paragraph) for links.

Our concern was that having links always extent would be more tiresome for editors, which I still agree with, and that extending but not over whitespace would be confusing, which I think is arguable, but the current behaviour is worse.

Change 73902 had a related patch set uploaded by Catrope:
Continue links

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/73902

Change 73902 merged by jenkins-bot:
Continue links

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/73902

That's all well and good, but now if my document ends in a link (a common case if I link the last thing I typed) I can't put plain text after it, which is the very reason we disabled trailing annotations for links in the first place...

(In reply to comment #5)

That's all well and good, but now if my document ends in a link (a common
case if I link the last thing I typed) I can't put plain text after it, which
is the very reason we disabled trailing annotations for links in the first
place...

You can - you just need to press the "clear annotations" button, or press return to get a new context with no pre-annotations. However, yes, these suck for discoverability. I think not-extending-over-whitespace is the best solution, though it's fiddly and difficult to support.

See bug 51463

With bug 51463 closed, this is now complete. Marking as fixed.