::doesn't help someone's understanding of  to be able to go read about November. 

 ::Look, I totally agree with you about that in principle, in fact I have always been totally mystified as to the reasons for date linking at all. When I first began to use Wikipedia, it took me quite a while to figure out the date wikilinks I was clicking on provided no information whatsoever on the topic in hand, and I found it quite irritating. 

 ::However, date wikilinks are a standard feature on Wiki and the question then is one of consistency. I see no reason why month + date + year strings should be wikilinked but standalone years should not be. It simply doesn't make any sense. The guideline gives qualified support for year wikilinking (your assertion that it is "out of date" notwithstanding) so it's a matter of user preference whether or not years are wikilinked, and I prefer to link them for the sake of consistency.  

 ::Also, as it happens, while I think wikilinks for individual dates are perfectly useless, year wikilinks are actually quite useful because they give you an overview of events that occurred around the immediate event in question, through which that event can be  contextualized. So I think there's a very good reason for including them, particularly in articles relating to war. I have actually found year wikilinks on a number of occasions to be extremely useful, so I intend to continue linking them. 

 ::However, as I said I will no longer be wikilinking standalone months and I will no longer be repeat linking years. It was actually an admin who told me all dates throughout an article should be wikilinked, so I assumed that was correct and didn't check the guidelines first, which is what I usually do. That was obviously was mistake, and unfortunately it means I will now have to go back through a substantial number of recently wikified articles to remove the excess links.