User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: May 6, 2015/@comment-5558012-20150506182506/@comment-452-20150508192851

It also doesn't help that the default welcome messages include a link to the first page someone edits Yeah, I really hate that. I changed it to an external link years ago, but every now and then I still encounter an olllld link, which are made worse on wikis with Message Wall enabled, as the old welcome message link is usually on an archived talk page which only admins can edit anyway.

One thing I've never considered before that you could do to quickly remove the links from WantedPages but keep them easily trackable for later removal would be to turn them into redirects, possibly pointing to to Category:Candidates_for_deletion, then you could look at Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Candidates_for_deletion for a list of old links which need to be fixed. Of course, redirecting a link in an article there wouldn't be too helpful, I'm primarily thinking of the case of links in old welcome messages, as you mentioned.