Playing tag

Anybody who glances at Wikipedia nowadays can't avoid the blizzard of tags attached to articles. Just to make sure nobody misses their electronic graffiti, the lazy-ass taggers, who can't be bothered to work on the articles themselves, usually splatter their butt-ugly tags at the top of the entries they deface. It's amazing that editors who work hard at improving articles put up with these jerks. At least I'll bash them here.

A typical example is the Deal or No Deal article. The asinine taggers have marred this entry with six tags that say nothing more than "I don't like this article." There are three tags that whine exactly the same complaint about "trivia" (meaning any content the moronic taggers don't like.) Another tag bitches that the article is too long. Breaks my heart, idiot. Another wants "table format", whatever that means. I'd like to table him.

These taggers have done precisely nothing to improve the article. Any halfway rational reader will ignore their nonsense and concentrate on the article's substance. Fortunately, the article has been built by people who want to write an encyclopedia, and offers a great deal of information on the show. It's too bad that some "editors" have to dump imbecilic comments in crappy boxes all over other people's work. I just hope their vandalism won't deter users of the encyclopedia.

All such tags, if used at all, should go onto an article's talk page. After all, lamebrain taggers of the world, the talk page exists for comments about an article. Even the wikify tags, which I use to find articles to work on, should rest quietly on the talk page and not scream at the top of an article.

Another example is an article I worked on today, Henry George Theorem. This brief entry about a mildly interesting bit of economic theory was festooned with three tags that took up more space than the article itself. I had no trouble finding references for the article and making the other demanded changes. But taggers can't be troubled to do a little real work. They just want to run up their edit counts with their useless goofball scrawls.

UPDATE: The Deal or No Deal article no longer has six tags. An editor took a meat-ax to the article. The wholesale destruction eliminated most of tags, along with much useful information. Deletionists are almost as much of a pain as taggers. Unfortunately, this deletionist is also a tagger. He hung two more tags on the article that say nothing more than "I don't like how this article is written." Of course, such comments should go on the talk page, but the urge to deface the article was too strong.