TITLE: Is Gödel's incompleteness theorem provable without any model-theoretic notion?
QUESTION [16 upvotes]: The entry on Gödel's incompletenss theorem in Wikipedia says:

Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true,[1] but not provable in the theory (Kleene 1967, p. 250).

My understanding of Gödel's theorem derived from the proof sketch in the article above is that it is completely formal (axioms+logical axioms+inference rules) and does not rely on any model-theoretic notion where truth is established (a formal sentence being true iff every interpretation of it in every model is true). 
But is this correct, that is are there proofs that use the apparatus of logic but do not not use any model theory at all? One piece of evidence that they must is that the quote above says that a statement is true but not proveable, and truth is a model-theoretic notion, unless of course there is a notion of truth different from model-theoretic truth? 
EDIT
There is a very similar question here.
From the answer there one notices that 'true' is taken in the standard model of the integers. This is not the same as the model-theoretic notion of true taken above. 
So, the question is refined to can we dispense with this restricted notion of truth and make the proof completely formal?

REPLY [10 votes]: Although it is not usually presented this way, the usual proof of the incompleteness theorem shows the following: 

For any sufficiently strong effective theory $T$ of arithmetic, with Gödel-Rosser sentence $G$, there is an algorithm that will take any proof of $G$ within $T$ and turn it into a proof of $0=1$ within $T$, and there is an algorithm that will take a proof of the negation of $G$ within $T$ and turn it into a proof of $0=1$ within $T$.

This has the immediate corollary:

For any sufficiently strong effective theory $T$ of arithmetic, with Gödel-Rosser sentence $G$, if $T$ does not prove $0=1$ then $T$ does not prove $G$ and $T$ does not prove the negation of $G$.

Neither of these statements, nor their proofs, requires any model theory. 
However, these syntactic statements leave open the question of whether $G$ is actually true. It's one thing to know that there is some sentence that is neither provable nor disprovable, but either $G$ or its negation has to be true as a statement about natural numbers, and it would be nice to know which one it is. The answer is that $G$ is true, rather than the negation of $G$.