They should be given a proper place (don't remove!). They should however be separated from 'development'.
Software-development and maintainance is a very serious business, please don't call it 'hacking' any longer because Wikipedia is reaching adulthood. :-) (Grown-up software-developers don't call themselves 'hackers': It's all about thinking and mathematics!)
Insulting nonsense. There are plenty of "grown-up" software developers who call themselves hackers. Ask the people at
http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
or the folks working on the Linux kernel:
for example. I wouldn't say that these people are not capable of thinking or do not understand mathematics.
Wikipedia is an open source project, and in the open source community, the term "hacker" has a much different tradition from other development groups. It is a perfectly appropriate term for the development process, unless you see open source itself as "unprofessional" and "not for grown- ups" (in which case you should don your asbestos suit..)
Regards,
Erik