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 dont know if people are still talking about this phenomenon we cant even wikify articles anymore Unbelievable BTW many of the other things you cited I would argue either dont 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 dont need this kind of handholding to get through an article They can judge for themselves whether a link is worth following Were here to provide readers information Were not selling something ie we dont need to try to keep eyeballs on our articles