Also bots do a pretty shitty job of fixing bare URLs they take a guess at the page title and stick it in there They re not always right and in any case they still can t provide things like author and publisher information and accessdates Better for a human to do the work up front to provide all that information when adding the reference it may seem tedious but it makes it exponentially easier to verify the content of the article and if the link ever goes dead you ll be glad you did it When you leave a bare URL like this and the link goes dead later there s often no way to recover the content talk contribs