Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140828002814/@comment-25263848-20140913003527

You may consider those as non reason, per your specific usage her on wikias, however, It doesn't mean that those aren't benefits in general.

I've never heard of any "long-standing policy of not using external links anywhere but in the external section". It seems like this is probably just another thing that someone made up on one wiki and people assume applies to all wikis without questioning it. This a general wikipidea policy. Which in many cases encouraged by staff and editors, to avoid people leaving the wiki, create content locally and or becoming an advertisement platform, hence the trusted site and monitoring I mentioned above. Speaking of which does guest users still get the pop-up warning that they are about to leave the site?

Keeping external links together in an external link section would remove the need for displaying the external link icon, but I think it's more useful to use them inline as needed. Don't forget that 'external link sections are limited to main namespace only and standard article structure (not portals or other namespaces\talk). Beside the policy I mentioned isn't a black and white probation, if you can find a justification for inclusion go ahead..

With all the above in mind, I think that standards should be mentioned as a good reason to use interwikis (at least on big wikis). You may consider interwiki benefits as non reason to you, but your reasons aren't necessarily true for other mediawiki projects and this is a commonly used convention by many potential experienced editors, which may lead to unnecessary confusion while editing. Meanwhile you have yet to suggest a benefit of using external links over interwikis, except one inconvenience that can be quickly dealt by a quick css fix.

I'd need to reread your post (Its been awhile) to think of another reason for interwikis. But from the top of my head, I think that server side external links are unique because they need to be processed by spam filers, though I doubt its big issue.