As requested by Melamrawy on my talk page in German-language Wikipedia, here is a translation of the points from the Meinungsbild (still in preparation, now with ten supporters which allows continuing the process). A short explanation of German Wikipedia's Meinungsbild process can be found here.
Pro:
- The Related pages suggestions may encourage reading more about related topics.
- Associative links, if selected automatically, aren't really in contravention of Themenringe and Neutraler Standpunkt (NPOV), because there's no subjective selection by humans, but a dispassionate algorithm that simply suggests pages that seem similar.
- The feature is active in the Wikipedia app since January 2015, basically without protests.
- Users clicking on more pages are generating more page views, thus potentially more donations.
- Any feature that keeps visitors longer on Wikipedia is a good feature. In addition to more knowledge gathered by readers, there is an increased chance that visitors will become Wikipedians, for example because they wish to fix errors they find.
- Wikipedia users may be able to discover pages that are orphaned or only sparsely linked to.
Contra:
- The "Related pages" links can be perceived as part of the article. For readers, it's not clear that these three links, unlike the actual article, aren't curated by humans, and an improper selection may be alienating.
- Manually correcting "Related pages" links may lead to disputes about a fitting selection, and a manual selection would be against Wikipedia:Themenringe.
- In cases where the links displayed are meaningful, they're usually already present at a fitting place in the article. Links that can't be integrated into the article are potentially rather not fitting.
- The embedded thumbnails don't allow for a direct link to the image description page, which may be problematic from a license point of view for images that aren't in the public domain (partly tracked in T124225 ).
- Through the algorithm choosing the "related pages" links, the Wikimedia Foundation interferes with content matters.
- The "related pages" links are a superfluous and imprecise duplication of the manually curated "See also" links (de:Hilfe:Siehe auch: Associative links are not suitable to create an unclear connection between an article's subject and connotated headwords such as "Far-right politics" or "Kitsch", bypassing the requirement to cite sources.)
- The "related pages" links visible in the article are invisible in the source code as well as in the Visual Editor; although it's possible to edit them, it's not obvious.
- The descriptions from Wikidata that are used for the short descriptions are disproportionately prone to vandalism which is then displayed on Wikipedia without being sighted [German Wikipedia has Flagged Revisions with "sighted versions"]
Neutral:
- We don't know whether the possibility to change the selection manually will lead to a new kind of vandalism and revert-wars, as some Wikipedians fear.