How does simply having what is basically a placeholder entry for each town/village/city etc. alleviate systemic bias? Most of these articles will be ignored completely after creation, while those that are expanded and improved will reflect the factors that led to systemic bias in content initially.
As to the proposal itself, I don't think its a big deal. I also don't think its of much value - if it works out to be mainly one or two line stubs, what encyclopedic value does that really add? Only people who already know that a town exists and what country its in will search for it, right? The one reference is nice, and the links to maps (if its on all stubs) is cool, but still. Creating 2 million more articles that won't be touched for a decade seems unnecessary and doesn't really bring much actual knowledge to the 'pedia, but aside from damaging the hell out of my random article patrolling it doesn't appear to present a serious problem either.
As to random article patrolling, its past time that there was a way to restrict this "randomness." Mostly I look for unreferenced and uncategorized BLPs, and if I could exclude all articles categorized as towns/villages/cities etc. that would really help. Is there already a way to do that?
Nathan