On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 07:20:27 -0800 (PST), wikien-l-request@Wikipedia.org wrote:
Dan Drake wrote
<snip> I wonder if a consensus might be possible on this: Any article that's showing a dispute-header is presumed to be a poor advertisement for the high quality of Wikipedia and must not be Featured until the problem is solved.
That means anyone can effectively 'censor' articles by disputing their neutrality, for whatever reason.
The article is still there, you know. We're just not calling everyone's attention to this splendid example of a disputed article. It's true that just one person hating the article, not enough to get it pulled by means of the list, could get it taken off _temporarily_; but this is not an automatic mechanism, much less irreversible.
Would it be too dangerous if some level-headed people were authorized to remove such an article immediately from the list without waiting for the complete process at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates ?
Who decides who is level-headed, here? Yes, too 'dangerous'.
That's why I tentatively suggested who might be accepted as level-headed, in a piece of text that unfortunately didn't make it into your posting. The bureaucrat is, of course, not required to take any action at all. It seems that a malicious editor could waste some of the bureaucrats' time in checking whether there really is an NPOV dispute before said editor gets banned; but then, nobody would be obliged to spend that time, but just empowered to.
If no one (barring Jimbo Wales) can be trusted to anything without a leisurely formal procedure, so be it. Unfortunate, but true. Still, balance the possible action (of taking it off FA by marking it as having a POV dispute) against another: messing up a Featured Article so that it's a disgrace to Wikipedia, which is still presenting it to the world as a proud and exemplary achievement that will attract new people to the project. This is the case right now; the other is hypothetical.