Nick wrote:
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