Links

Of course, they do:

When knowledge is not equivalent with information but with the (intelligent) connection between pieces of information, links can be a useful thing in itself.

Imagine, someone published an article here on the website regarding a topic A but also containing information on topic B, while s/he is not aware of this. Another person writes an article about topic B, but is not aware of the information in the first article. You yourself may not be allowed to put links into or edit the documents of your colleagues. At least, you may create a link object to point from one place to the other document - or even to a web-page "outside" of the Content Management System (CMS) in the "outer limits" of the "wild wild web"... By doing this, the information is not only available to the authors and many others, but it is also clear who added it.

And: Because such a link item is again an object in itself as part of the CMS, others may link to your link, for instance, saying that the connection you saw is completely wrong ... :-) If they think so, they should not be allowed to delete your link, because it may turn out in the long run, that you were right and that the information is worth a Nobel Prize ... ;-)

As you can see (or might test yourself) a link as a separate object "outside" any special "page-like" document has a lot of more options than the simple in-line link. You may allow others to comment on it, add categories, dates, information about the owner/creator/other contributors etc.

So, in a way, a link is almost a full-fledged content type residing inside the CMS, except, it does not contain a large "Body Text" area - if you need that, than you should use a "page-like" content item, instead, like the page, event, news item ...