Translations:Manual:$wgAllowExternalImages/29/en

To prevent "link rot". An image on another site may have been valid when a wiki article was originally created, but there is no guarantee that an independent external site will remain up, with the same content at the same URL, in the future. Any change in the design of the external site has the potential to break external links to individual files on that site. The same problem exists for textual hyperlinks of course, but for broken image references you will wind up with an ugly error box if the link is broken.