Ray (Eclectology) begs us to stop begging the question:
"How do we make 'Articles needing attention' more functional?"
Well, the problem is that we are trying to take too much of a bureaucratic approach. Categorize an article by the type of problem you feel it represents, and hope someone will take care of it.
That would work fine, if we had a fully-staffed help desk. The assigned copy-editors would fix spelling, punctuation, grammar and such whenever someone posted an article at [[Wikipedia:articles needing copy-editing]]. The assigned NPOV experts would neutralize any article having NPOV problems; and so on.
The problem, I say again, is that we don't have a fully-staffed help desk. We are not a bureaucracy, let alone a professional one like EB or the NY Times. We're terribly understaffed, and frightfully disorganized (even polarized!).
My solution:
We are still small enough that everyone knows each other -- or can get acquainted quickly enough. I suggest that when an article has a problem, we simply refer it to a person who we know is able and willing to fix it.
The form of the request goes something like, "Hey, user:X, can you take a look at [[article Y]]? It lacks coherence/neutrality/detail..."
Personally,
Ed Poor (aka Uncle Ed)