I made an interwiki link like [[wikipedia:asdwqe]], it showed up without the external icon, then when I opened it in VE it had the external icon... And when I went to edit it, it was apparently an external link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/asdwqe (and if you edit this to point to a different enwiki page, it knows how to generate the interwiki syntax again with the new target title)

Apparently this is a Parsoid thing:
<a rel="mw:ExtLink" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/asdwqe" title="wikipedia:asdwqe" data-parsoid='{"stx":"piped","a":{"href":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/asdwqe"},"sa":{"href":"wikipedia:asdwqe"},"isIW":true,"dsr":[0,30,19,2]}'>interwiki</a>

Yes, Parsoid used to distinguish these and got rid of the DOM distinction.

We could modify modules/ve-mw/ce/annotations/ve.ce.MWExternalLinkAnnotation.js to only addClass( 'external' ) if !JSON.parse( model.element.originalDomElements[0].getAttribute( 'data-parsoid' ) ).isIW.

But apparently that's bad.

I don't know why it was removed, but Parsoid should restore the DOM distinction between these. Users expect interwiki links not to be marked as external, presumably because the are more trustworthy.

Is this a duplicate of T102556 ?

In T103636#1721416, @Esanders wrote:

Is this a duplicate of T102556 ?

No, it's the reverse. T102556 asks for VE to be able to tell Parsoid whether URL links should be serialized as interwiki links or external links, whereas this task asks for Parsoid to indicate whether links that it marks as external are actually external or just interwiki links (right now the Parsoid output doesn't distinguish).

@ssastry Is this something your team could take a quick look at to gauge the difficulty of a fix? Thanks. :-)

In T103636#3614315, @Deskana wrote:

@ssastry Is this something your team could take a quick look at to gauge the difficulty of a fix? Thanks. :-)

Yes, i've added it to tomorrow's team meeting agenda.