David Goodman wrote:
This is what people may actually do, and it of course makes a farce of the whole thing... With one approach, I do not need a library or even Google... At the next level up, using another approach, I take a recent biochemistry textbook, and I go through it systematically... With a good semi automatic bot, using online sources only, I could probably do it two times as fast. It could even be completely automated after selected the book.
WP:BEANS! WP:BEANS! WP:BEANS!
(Seriously, I won't be a bit surprised if tools like this start appearing over the next year or so.)
But who does this help? Anyone reading the article can do this just as well when reading it.
Precisely. But the urge for mindless automation is strong (as witness the predilection for bots that automatically add a nice, templateized, "personal" welcome to the talk page of each new editor).