The owner of the node would still see the original shortcut link - all conversion would be done when preparing the data for a HTTP request. The data for each node must be processed before sending it over HTTP anyway (all stuff in square brackets has to be redone as <A href=...>) and in this conversion loop, I would add the conversion of those "special" nodes. Maybe my imagination of how Perlmonks works is wrong :).

Of course this would make some nodes more equal than other nodes, as no more nodes whose titles match for example

  /^(RFC|CPAN):(.*)/i
[download]

could be created, which will confuse the user trying to create such a node. A totally static and within-the-system solution would maybe be the best and least painful solution.