Angela (beesley@gmail.com) [050427 15:03]:
I feel Wikipedia has way too many of these boxes already, and we need to make sure these don't proliferate by allowing any free content site to add their link in this proposed box if that link is not useful to readers of that article.
Jamesday has occasionally threatened to switch templates off altogether when the database is having a particularly hard time of it. While drastic, after one too many boxes this solution does have a certain appeal.
For promoting Wikimedia's own projects, the template is more justifiable, but even there, I would prefer if this was regarded more as meta data than as article content. Generating sister project links automatically, or having them as part of the interface rather than the article would be far preferable. Anthere made a request in bugzilla related to this last year (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708).
They are metadata, really. A place for this sort of related *internal* metadata (which Wikicities and Wikitravel content most certainly isn't) would be a very useful thing. Same for spoken versions of articles (there's some dispute on en: where and how to link these). It's the sort of stuff that *almost* belongs in the interwiki language links, but *not quite*.
- d.