Apart from the usual wikilawyers warring and reverting everything, I've also recently found lots of bots come by just to tag edits, which were correct, as possible vandalism, etc.
Plus the problem mentioned in the article that it's no longer "okay" just to drop a url into an article, everything has to match some bizarro world template that no one would ever want to fill out given their lousy pay rates.
And for all that, the wiki staff is too stupid/poor/unimaginative to automatically download and archive what the urls in the articles point to, meaning that the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot.
It's also fun to contribute a new article and then see it nominated for swift deletion because it rubs someone the wrong way and has violated one of a trillion different little wiki policies all put up to justify reverting/deleting otherwise fine content.
The template isn't as important as the source; if you drop an IEEE/ACM/jstor/Citeseer URL in lieu of a formatted citation, that's fine, and someone should fix it up later into the full journal citation. If it's a URL to a DailyKos diary or something, though, that's less useful.
I would claim you've got it skewed, especially for someone posting from Hacker News. Let me try and reformulate it:
If you drop a URL in that's fine, one of our bots will come by, not to chastise your edit as possible vandalism, but to fill out the journal entry for you and download the url and archive it.
That is basically what happens, at least some of the time. The bots are mostly volunteer-run rather than something official or consistent (framework code and an API are open), but I've definitely had bots come by and improve my citations, usually doing things like converting a bare nytimes.com or jstor.com URL into a proper citation.
An interesting project for HN folks might be to write bots to take care of stuff that isn't currently being automated. Of course, perhaps instead we want the Wikimedia Foundation doing more of this. They're moving in that direction to some extent, though I don't much like that. In the past I've argued against that direction, because I think one of Wikipedia's strengths is its open, volunteer-run nature, rather than being a professionalized/bureaucratized NGO type organization with paid staff and centralized organization--- I'd rather WMF just ran the servers.
Plus the problem mentioned in the article that it's no longer "okay" just to drop a url into an article, everything has to match some bizarro world template that no one would ever want to fill out given their lousy pay rates.
And for all that, the wiki staff is too stupid/poor/unimaginative to automatically download and archive what the urls in the articles point to, meaning that the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot.
It's also fun to contribute a new article and then see it nominated for swift deletion because it rubs someone the wrong way and has violated one of a trillion different little wiki policies all put up to justify reverting/deleting otherwise fine content.