You should be able to work around this currently like this:

1. Upload the new file with new extension
2. Turn the old file into a redirect to the new one

(It _might_ be necessary to delete the old file in there too for the redirect to work, I don't recall exactly what reqs we put on those for now.)

Longer term, there's an idea to stop including the file extension in the on-wiki addressable name (splitting the raw filename from the on-wiki name, essentially) which this bug entry should either be duped to or set to depend on, but I can't find it at the moment.

(In reply to comment #1)

Longer term, there's an idea to stop including the file extension in the
on-wiki addressable name (splitting the raw filename from the on-wiki name,
essentially) which this bug entry should either be duped to or set to depend
on, but I can't find it at the moment.

That's bug 4421.

(In reply to comment #1)

Longer term, there's an idea to stop including the file extension in the
on-wiki addressable name (splitting the raw filename from the on-wiki name,
essentially) which this bug entry should either be duped to or set to depend
on, but I can't find it at the moment.

That bug was so that the File page contents (eg: licenses) could get index by the engines since some of them just forgot about it based on the web address extension.

This would break things, especially where we have two completely different images which have the same name.
For example on en.wikipedia [[File:Example.png]] and [[File:Example.svg]] (technically commons) which are designed differently because different formats support different things.

Bug 4421 as currently discussed wouldn't force changes to any existing files (but would allow them to be bulk-renamed to drop the extensions where there's not a conflict).

I decided to close this my bug because I consider my request already included in bug 4421. Thank you for the attention.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 4421 ***