On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:07 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Responding more to the opinion piece published in the Signpost, than what you are saying, my experience of looking through such backlogs is large amounts of mis-labelling, or outdated labelling. Is it very discouraging to think you are working on a backlog to find that the article either never had the alleged problem, or that it was fixed but no-one bothered to remove the tag identifying the problem. So I think those numbers quoted in that opinion piece are worthless (i.e. over-inflated through poor tagging practices). Random sampling, tailored to specific areas, would give a better idea of the extent of any problems, IMO. What I think often happens is that someone tagging stuff thinks: "there is a problem with this article, but rather than use the right tag, or look at the problem in any detail, I'll put a tag on to be safe and then move on". And then someone else, later, might fix the article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no, really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you should come back and assess whether it is still needed). And this in general put me off tags. I've hardly ever tagged articles (preferring to fix them myself or point them out to someone who can fix them), and I tend to ignore tags on articles, preferring to form my own judgement over whether an article is reliable or not (i.e. why should I trust the judgement of a random Wikipedian over whether the article has problems, when all articles should be read with jaundiced eye towards potential problems?). Carcharoth