Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140828002814/@comment-452-20140913004126

"Non-reason" as in "reason which doesn't exist", those external links do NOT have nofollow set - you can check them for yourself. Therefore there is no SEO benefit in using interwiki links instead of those links and saying "Interwiki links should be used for SEO" is... not a reason. It's like saying "You should drink lots of water to get lots of Iron and Vitamin C". Water doesn't have any Iron or Vitamin C, and interwiki links have no SEO benefit.

This is not wikipedia.

This is not other mediawiki projects.

edit: I logged out and clicked those three links, and there was no pop-up. I've seen that on memory-alpha, so I know what you're talking about, but I do not know of anywhere else that does that. (But I'm logged in most of the time, so it's possible I just avoided them.)

edit: regarding "standards": Standards for the sake of standards without an actual reason for them is exactly what the monkey story is about.