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A bit of anecdotal evidence in favor of brief, well-placed inline HTML comments: our year and date articles used to be vandalized several times a day by newbies adding themselves (or their friends, or their enemies, or the unpopular kid at school, et al.). When we added HTML comments like "Please do not add yourself" to the end of the "Births" sections, the rate of these silly additions dropped considerably. HTML comments haven't eliminated the problem, but they've curtailed it.
HTML comments are also very helpful on some project pages. On [[Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism]], for example, there's an HTML comment on each of the "Alerts" sub- sections. These comments help newbies report all the information an admin might need to respond to vandalism.
In any case, I haven't seen any community consensus against HTML comments. If anything, I've seen one in favor of them.
Jim Redmond jim@scrubnugget.com