[WikiEN-l] Elimination of unreferenced articles drive?

[Steve Summit]

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).