"Avoid linking the names of major geographic features and locations, nations, languages, religions, and common professions." OK, no offense to you, personally, but holy shit... now we have guidelines that actually discourage linking to other articles on "legitimate" topics (as opposed to, say, random dates or typical English words)? No wonder experienced editors are leaving the project in droves (or "have left" — I don't know if people are still talking about this phenomenon): we can't even wikify articles anymore! Unbelievable... (BTW, many of the other things you cited I would argue either don't apply to my changes, or are "only guidelines" that should not be followed if they hurt the usefulness of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia — which, frankly, I think is exactly what your "overzealous" [if I may be so bold] application of these linking guidelines amounts to.) As you can see, this has disturbed me greatly; as a result, I have whined about it elsewhere. Finally, in response to your comment, "The idea is the get readers to at least read through the lead section without being distracted by articles that are not related to the topic that they have stumbled upon": Readers don't need this kind of hand-holding to get through an article. They can judge for themselves whether a link is worth following. We're here to provide readers information. We're not selling something (i.e., we don't need to try to "keep eyeballs" on our articles). -