User:Gaohoyt

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[edit] Why I hate tags

A million monkeys typing long
Might not make something banal
As half a million editors
And every of them anal

I know that many of you are editors, but imagine for a moment that you are an encyclopedia user in need of information of some sort. You open up your Encyclopaedia Britannica and find the article related to your question, only to be confronted with an imposing box reading "This article may not be written from a neutral point of view" or "This article may require cleanup".

Maintenance tags may be useful in drawing the attention of editors to articles that could indeed use some improvement. But they are fundamentally disrespectful toward the reader. In particular:

• They may unjustly cast aspersions on the facts contained in the article
• Their absence from an article may create an undeserved confidence in the article's contents
• They are fundamentally an opinion, often of just one person
• They may discourage people from improving the article (it is easier to just leave a tag)
• They have indefinite life spans with no obvious criteria for removal
• They are ugly

But this is not just an appeal to be selective in your use of tags. I implore you to be aggressive in your deletion of the darn things (within Wikipedia rules, of course). From what I observe, a tag is usually left by a single individual (often robotically assisted), with no corresponding discussion on the talk page, even if the tag promises one. These should be deleted immediately. Some are in the wrong place, perhaps at the top of the article though they only apply to one section. Some are vanity tags, some are exceptionally ugly, some are just silly. Nearly all belong on the discussion page, not in the article itself.

Please don't delete "spoiler" tags, as these do serve a purpose to the reader. And I don't object to the "This is a stub" tag if it is placed discretely at the bottom. But please help me fight the proliferation of these opinion tags. They were placed there by one person. They can be deleted by one person, and perhaps you are that person.