Death Phoenix wrote:
I think it's most useful to detect original research and speculation. For example, in [[Colonization of Mars]], I noticed two recent additions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colonization_of_Mars&diff=6694... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colonization_of_Mars&diff=6695...) that weren't common knowledge and I was wondering where the heck they found this information.
As another potentially interesting case, I recently added 272(!) {{citation needed}}s to the article [[List of Star Wars races]] (before I subsequently split it into five sub-articles for size reasons, see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Star_Wars_races&oldid=68661770 for the pre-split version).
I felt this was a reasonable thing to do since the Star Wars universe is defined and described in a truly vast range of books and movies and other media, and each of the hundreds of races listed on that page could well come from completely different sources. Ensuring that each one had at least one citation seems a lot easier this way than by putting a single {{unreferenced}} at the top - this way there's more of a checklist one can knock items off of by substituting references in their place (and indeed some references were added even as I did the work of requesting citations).
It'll probably take years for most of those cite requests to be resolved (unless some brave soul with good access to Star Wars sources makes a major project of it), but IMO eventualism is a perfectly fine philosophy for this sort of thing.