I wouldn't lose sleep over critics "having a field day" on any particular weak article. Sad to say, if people really want to find problematic material in Wikipedia, then they won't have to look very hard, regardless of the quality of any individual article like [[Opus Dei]]. Wikipedia is, effectively, permanently "under construction" -- although the increasingly large set of core articles is becoming pretty solid, it's always going to be easy to find an embarrasingly-naff entry somewhere.
This is like the people who test "machine translation" by tossing odd phrases it at, until they find some idiom that trips it up:
* "blood, sweat and tears" into Russian (and back) produces something like "bleeding, bile and body water"
Then, like the vultures they are, they pounce: "See? It's inaccurate?"
Remember, these are the same journalists who play gotcha with presidents they don't like (see [[Bushisms]]). If you look hard enough, you can always find some embarassing phrase or incident, to help you make your target look bad (so you can discredit him).
This is the sort of thing that drove away Larry Sanger (in part): lack of respect for accomplishment, diligence and solid scholarship. You try to find some small thing to pick on, and then (illegitimately) imply that it's representative of the whole. (I started to write an article on [[damaging quotation]]s one time.)
To make Wikipedia really solid, SOMEBODY has to start verifying and endorsing Article Versions. I still credit Larry Sanger as the originator of the "sifter project", and I eagerly wait integration of Magnus's software updates.
We need to be able to identify stable versions of articles - especially important articles. I want to see tags such as:
* copy-edited by Vicki R. * vandalism-patrolled by maveric149 * NPOV-checked by Anthere
Sure, multiple people can add their endorsements. I don't want to see a "tag war" start, where one person adds the NPOV-dispute tag, and another removes it. If someone *I* respect says the article passes or fails the NPOV test, then that's all I care about. If someone *you* respect tags it a certain way, that's all *you* care about.
Uncle Ed