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.
