I started off mainly adding film infoboxes and uploading film posters. However, I got into an almighty spat with somebody about a picture I uploaded of this actress. I was finally persuaded about the legitimacy, or otherwise, of a lot of images on Wikipedia that are thought to be free use but are actually not. I have nothing against images, just believe that Wikipedia should be as free as possible and copyrighted images from other sources are not free enough.
"Temporal float": use of terms such as recently, soon, and so on, which very quickly lose their meaning. I just discovered[when?] the {{when}} tag, which I will probably now[when?] proceed to overuse.
"Cleaning up white space": Huh? White space is good. Lackofwhitespaceisoftenconfusing. The specific "cleanup" of annoyance to me is taking fields in an inline citation template that have been laid out one-field-per-line (so-called "vertical formatting") and mooshing them into one line. Maybe I can't convince you to use white space yourself (in which case I'm guessing you probably were never a programmer), but please don't unilaterally delete white space that another editor has gone to the trouble of inserting for clarity and ease of maintenance. (Note that this has nothing to do with removing blanks at the end of sentences or collapsing multiple blank lines where only one is called for. Clean away and feel the pride!)
"Simplifying" links by avoiding redirects, often by adding or changing a pipe. If this is at all tempting to you, please read Wikipedia:Redirect#Do not "fix" links to redirects that are not broken. The proper approach is to use the valid link that best matches the (presumably correct) text being linked—which could very well be a redirect. This often results in not having to use a pipe at all (simplification!). BOCTAOE; for example, using a pipe that expands an abbreviation upon mouse-hover isn't a bad thing at all.
Speaking of simplicity: I've found myself actively defending against the inclusion of unnecessary hatnotes, and it's all about avoiding clutter in any user interface. A couple of instructive examples:
Alarmists abound, but to paraphrase Newton Minow (from the same speech that "a vast wasteland" came from): When Wikipedia is good, nothing—not the encyclopedia, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.
(Of course, there are a lot of places it just plain sucks out loud.)
I mention this ("good", not "sucks out loud") because of the gem I ran across today[when?][kind of annoying, innit?]: the name of the S. S. Minnow turns out to have been chosen by Sherwood Schwartz as his own little protest/commentary/revenge against Minow. And there's a citation and everything. This is the kind of serendipitous discovery that keeps me coming back to Wikipedia.
