portal-url ("Community portal"), currentevents-url ("Current events") and helppage ("Help") lead to empty pages in a fresh MediaWiki install, when most projects won't need these pages ever.
Let's save some work to new MediaWiki sysadmins by removing those links.
This is by on my own experience as MediaWiki hobbyist sysadmin. But also:
I went to http://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Youngest_websites and I took a couple of samples of about 10 sites in languages that i could understand:
- Most recent
- 1 year old or more
Among the most recent (up to 2 months old) most still had those 3 links, leading to empty pages. The rest had removed 1, 2 or the 3 of them.
Among the 1 year old sample most had modified the Sidebar removing 2-3 of those links and offering sensible, non-empty pages for all options.
Most people setting up a MediaWiki has seen Wikipedia and is probably considering whether to have or not an own community portal or help. I don't think we need to force new MediaWiki sysadmins to have them or learn to remove them from the sidebar - seeing that what happens most of the times is that those pages are in the meantime left empty (bad user experience).
Version: 1.22.0
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53886