Stupid badges. Encouraging people to make useless pages(or make pages useless) instead of making existing ones better.
On one hand, it encourages people to contribute by providing a 'rep' incentive which can lead to content that might not otherwise be shared. On the other hand, it litters the wiki with stub pages, expositionary article additions, and generally redundant and un-insightful material.
If the badges were tied more directly to content improvement projects or at least didn't reward mindless contributions I might feel differently. I mean come on...where's the badge for, "You've just constructed your first wiki table in an article", or "You have helped verify [name of content here]".
The badge system has inspired me to add a couple pages that were missing for in-game objects. So by that fact, other more capable people than myself must have probably thrown their hats into the ring, but by and large it's made me notice more garbage and filler contributions than before. The adjusting of which makes me feel like a janitor. I worry that will be all that regular contributors will become. ...And I lament the thought.--Xclockwatcher 19:09, June 27, 2011 (UTC)
On a side note, I've taken to referring to useless posters as Bloatflies.