Ray Saintonge wrote:
The people who regularly nominate articles for cleanup would do well to spend time doing cleanup instead of creating work for everyone else.
I think both have a purpose. I've cleaned up (and written) hundreds (if not thousands) of articles, but I don't always have time or expertise to fix something I stumble across. IMO, if I find a new page that is clearly grossly subpar, it's better to at least tag it than to completely leave it as is. Not tagging it often leads to really terrible non-articles not being discovered for months, since once stuff gets past NewPages and RecentChanges, it gets buried amidst 500,000+ articles. (And yes, I've found untouched stuff from 3-4 months ago when hitting RandomPage).
-Mark