The default sidebar for Wikimedia wikis is not the one defined in core's languges/i18n/en.json, but the one that overrides that in WikimediaMessages' i18n/wikimediaoverrides/en.json.
Core's en.json hasn't included the "currentevents" link since 2013, but it has remained in the default for Wikimedia wikis because the Wikimedia-specific override was added around 2010, and nobody changed it to reflect the 2013 changes.
The 2013 changes removed three links:
- portal
- currentevents
- helppage
All three are still present in the Wikimedia override message.
I am ambivalent about the "(Community) portal" message, because it could be a useful venue for a village pump page (but maybe the name should be changed to reflect that, in that case?).
The "currentevents" message is pretty useless, IMO. The English Wikipedia uses it for a page that has, well, Current events (i.e. "In the news"), but having such a page doesn't even make sense for most non-Wikipedia projects. This should definitely be removed from the default sidebar, I think.
I am also a bit ambivalent about the "helppage" message. Its default target nowadays is "mw:Special:MyLanguage/Help:Contents", which is good because you can actually find some helpful stuff there, but it might also be confusing for users because it takes you away from the wiki you were on initially.
Proposal
- Remove the "currentevents" message from Wikimedia's default immediately. This should be uncontroversial I think.
- Have some WMF UX/UI experts (hence the Wikimedia-Design tag) take a closer look at the other two messages to decide whether they should be kept, removed or changed as default messages.