So you reject links to categories as well, presumably. And disambiguation links to mediawiki and wikipedia namespaces?
I was waiting for this answer.
A [[Category:Foobar]] link can *easily* be stripped out of the text. In every stage of the artice it is clear that it cannot be embedded into text (just because it is always displayed outside the text) so none will come to the idea making removal of a category hard ([[:category:foobar]] is something different and is evil in articles).
I was talking about [[:Category:...]] links. Since we were talking about "evil" links across namespaces. Let's take an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_Connecticut
Note the links: * See also: Category:Villages in Connecticut
This is obviously a useful link. It takes the user to a dynamic, always-up-to-date list of every article in Wikipedia that is about a village in Connecticut. There's nothing remotely "evil" about it.
Here's another one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ski_areas The category links effectively tell the reader "this page may not be up to date. click here for a guaranteed up to date list".
This is not an argument against linking from one space to another. If you're worried about downstream content reusers, the easy solution is to use a template like {{selfref}} to indicate that a link is not part of the encyclopaedic content.
I am not interested in inventing yet another meta content template. It is hard enough handling the existing ones (like navigation bars and this is a $foobar stub and foobar-display-problems) already.
How does "use a template like {{selfref}}" equate to "invent yet another meta content template"?
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiReader/Sonnensystem. Also cross wiki links in articles about Wikipedia itself are a common problem. They should be done as usual weblinks also in order to reflect distance to oneself.
Wait, so now it's ok to make links to articles about Wikipedia, as long as they're formatted as [http:// ] links rather than [[ ]] links. And yet you really don't want to use templates? You're clearly trying to encode a semantic distinction ("distance to oneself"), so why not use a semantic template?
Steve