Personally, I'd rather see no further time wasted
on templates, and editors
time spent removing the need for these templates on as many different
articles as possible. It's endless discussions on colours, decisions on
changes and time editing these templates that could be much better spent
adding references, fixing POV issues, dredging Flickr for free images and
what not that has been wasted, in my opinion, on designing new templates.
There's also a defeatist attitude here. There's some sort of bizarre thought
that these templates are going to remain on articles for ever, maybe they
are, but that's not the attitude we need here. Get them off pages as quickly
as possible.
I seem to keep repeating myself over and over again, but instead of tagging
a dozen pages, why not fix half a dozen pages. I remind our newer users that
references can be really, really quickly created with
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/makeref.php and I heartily recommend this
for anybody who would like to help with referencing but can't. I blitzed
British Airways a couple of weeks ago and was able to remove all but one of
the citation needs tags with five or ten minutes, only one point took little
longer to reference. So, don't tag when you can reference, wikify or
dePOV-ify something yourself within the amount of time you have available.
</rant>
So, the citation tags worked as intended, then, by motivating you to
replace them with the needed references?
-- Neil