The link placeholders are causing lots of problems in 1.4: links that do not appear in the body text end up with the placeholder comments but are never replaced with the actual links.
For example, the user name in the subtitle for Special:Contributions. This may be behind http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/206 also.
This is kind of a problem. Do we need a way to turn the placeholdering on and off, or should we have distinct makeLink* functions for making placeholder links?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)