User:Rividian/Tag blight

We've all seen an article with 2-3 "cleanup tags" at the top. Often it can seem daunting to go to multiple pages in a row and not have one of them contain at least one such tag. These tags seem to have begun with cleanup and pov in early 2004, but really picked up in specificity and range of use with unreferenced in 2005 and by 2008 there are templates for nearly every imaginable defect an article might be said to have.

There has been great discussion about what these templates should look like, but the primary goal of this essay is to examine their impact in general, assuming they continue to look roughly as they do now (most changes are merely to color and icon schemes and do not effect the basic nature of the template).

Templates have proliferated remarkably, but in a largely disorganized way. New templates are created on a whim and often spread organically and this can itself indicate their usefulness: an apt template might be added to thousands of articles by hundreds of editors because it addresses a percieved need, while a poorly concieved template might rarely be used. Other times the spread might be less organic, as templates like orphan were added to vastly more articles by a single robot than by all the human editors who've used it combined.

The point is that templates spread in a relatively haphazard way - there is no organized body that creates them and oversees their use. At best, Templates for deletion removes them on occasion, but in practice, it is difficult for a cleanup template to be deleted unless it truly misrepresents policy.

If nothing else, the unplanned nature of how cleanup templates are created and implemented means the topic deserves some study. No one every actually said, "Let's add a box to explain every problem articles face to the top of those articles" - and yet that is essentially the current state of affairs. This essay will explore whether it really make sense to go about this process in such a way.