2025 started great. By May, I had restored 29 featured pictures, ranging from history to opera to literature to television, but I wouldn't have another featured picture until November, and nearly gave up on Wikipedia by July. What happened?

Well, to explain that, we need to explain the saga of J. K. Rowling, an article nowhere near what anyone would consider a featured article, which somehow had remained one, and the bizarre procedure for shepherding an article through a featured article review.

Firstly, it became a featured article in 2007. The featured version contains very little that remains in the article, and is substantially shorter. So there's a lot of material that has undergone minimal review, and the article grew bloated and unbalanced.

I think the first featured article review (in 2022, three years before mine) probably did this article the biggest disservice on this front. As an attempt to save it, a lot of content that people requested was added in a very short time. As a consequence, the article as it stood at the end of the 2022 review is rather bloated, poorly structured, and the way it groups of the material feels fairly random. It has an astounding amount of literary analysis of the Harry Potter series, to the point of having multi-paragraph sections on style and allusions in the Harry Potter series, themes of the Harry Potter series (yes, that's a seperate multi-paragraph section), gender and social division in the Harry Potter series, religious reactions to the Harry Potter series, and a few more sections that are merely mostly about the Harry Potter series. Her biography feels bloated and indiscriminate in its selection of facts, though it's perhaps hard to explain that with examples: it's not that it's entirely bad to talk about her childhood neighbours named Potter, or to seemingly list all the jobs her parents had from the time they got together to when she was an adult, but it's not well-structured, it jumps around too much, and it rambles. A personal pet peeve is that it's prone to listing every book in a series and when it was published in prose, even if it doesn't have much to say about them, leading to a long series of "Harry Potter and the... was published in XXXX, after which Harry Potter and the...", and ditto for the at-least-less-repetitively-titled Cormoran Strike series. One could more sensibly list them in a bibliography. In fact, it does list them in a bibliography. All these are issues that I raised in my featured article review, and, given it was delisted at the end, I presume that a majority of readers agreed.

The review also served to shut down discussion for years afterwards, since it was so big, complex, well-attended, and so on, and thus the fact that the Featured Article Review had happened was regularly used to shut down proposed edits to the article (a review of the archives of Talk:J. K. Rowling between about 2023-24 will find it regularly cited for that purpose). In fact, in general, the article had developed one of the most toxic editing environments I've ever seen: A revision of a section that began with a draft in April 2024 wouldn't be resolved until the end of June. And occupies three talk page archives, with a drafter working to incorporate commentary from others, and no-one else allowed to edit the proposed prose. This was immediately followed by burnout; the next talk page archive covers seven months, but does include the claim that "I don't think the version was ready to be installed, people lost patience when we were almost over the finish line (so we don't have a strong consensus version), but I was too busy to say so then ... [...] Slower and steadier was doing the job; I hope we can resume that mode of editing."

The talk page archives are full of people raising points, discussing them for a while, then giving up and disappearing from any further work on the article, after having been stonewalled by process long enough to get them to go away. This may well not have been intentional, but this was very much The Article that Almost No-one Could Edit nestled within The Enclyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit.

All the above would be enough to cause problems for any featured article, but we do need to discuss the elephant in the room: In the case of Rowling's article, there's the further challenge that in the last five or six years, she's become highly controversial for being a very notable opponent of transgender people. In the last year or so, this escalated further as she has funded organisations making lawsuits that stripped rights from people (For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers) and created funds specifically to help people start their own lawsuits against organisations that don't deny those people's rights (the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund). A change from being a non-controversial, beloved figure to a highly controversial figure is always going to pose challenges to an article.

Further, this change was fairly gradual, which causes problems of its own. One can read The Week's article on her descent for a reasonably good summary of full context, and it's probably wise to avoid getting too deep into this here, but to pull two examples from that article, in 2020, she wrote she was a "supporter of trans people's right to live free of persecution" and that she "absolutely refute[d] the accusation that [she] hate[d] trans people or wish[ed] them ill", whereas in a 2024 tweet she explicitly linked the mere recognition of the existence of transgender people to violence and crime, and claimed that recognising their existance was actively dangerous, writing that "In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls." and "The re-definition of 'woman' to include every man who declares himself one has already had serious consequences for women's and girls’ rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt, as ever, by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors." and even "It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man."

I have to bring this up because it is a problem for the article: The gradual increase in rhetoric means that sources were and are constantly going out of date, and that it's very easy to mislead if you don't make it very clear where in her journey someone stated support for her, or mix sources from very different eras. Most of the discussion on the talk page concentrates solely on this, and almost no attention was being paid to the rest of the article.

The one event that most epitomises editing J. K. Rowling for me is the discussion of a source formerly used in the article, commonly referred to as "Suissa and Sullivan" after the authors. It is, to anyone looking at all neutrally, a patently bad source. It meanders from point to point, cites random blogs, and presents some extremely fringe viewpoints.

Worse, it didn't actually source the material it was meant to source. The only two quotes that mention Rowling in that entire article are the following:

Page 66: "The book-burnings and #RIPJKRowling hashtag provoked by JK Rowling’s latest novel before it had been generally released exemplify the capacity for those so-minded to be outraged by words they have not read" (Nothing before or after this connects it with anything else discussed)

Page 69: "The treatment of J.K. Rowling, subjected to a tidal wave of requests to ‘choke on a basket of dicks’ and similar, in response to a strikingly thoughtful and empathetic essay, is simply the highest profile case of a commonplace phenomenon (Leng, 2020; Rowling, 2020). Rowling’s intervention was prompted by the fact that women who speak publicly on these issues face campaigns of harassment, including attempts to get them fired."

The text this was meant to source? "As her views on the legal status of transgender people came under scrutiny, she received insults and threats."

You will notice that there is nothing in the entirety of Suissa and Sullivan - and you can easiy confirm that if you think I left something out - that refers to Rowling's views on the legal status of transgender people. There's nothing in it that discusses threats. There is a hyperbolic mention of insults - sourced to a random blog of a non-notable person,^[1] with the hyperbole about "a tidal wave of requests" added by, you guessed it, Suissa and Sullivan.

In short, it's a bad paper, a bad source, doesn't even cover more than a word or two of the sentence it was meant to cite, and could be trivially replaced with a much better source. And yet... Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 440#Suissa and Sullivan has endless attempts to defend its usage by the Rowling talk page regulars.

Even what should have been simple discussions... weren't.

Also, you'd think after all that that the source wouldn't be in the article, wouldn't you? No. I checked while writing this, and it was back. It was used to source a list of laws that Rowling objected to. As I've quoted everything about Rowling from the entire article, you can patently see that the paper doesn't even mention it. The sourcing on the article is blatantly terrible, honestly, if anyone actually went in and checked all the sources, I'm pretty sure a lot of the article would need to be thrown out. How was this a featured article?

So far, we've discussed the 2022 Featured Article Review that led to the article becoming a bloated mess, and the two reviews that got rapidly shut down. There may have been other featured article reviews that were deleted: we know that at least one of them was nominated for speedy deletion after closure. Let's now move on to the latest Featured Article Review.

I'm not sure that any interactions about that article reflect well on anyone. It's not easy to have people calling for you to be sanctioned for simply having started a FAR. The number of personal attacks thrown against me were incredibly high, and while I tried to keep neutral, I think that literal years of frustration with this article and the editors thereof couldn't help to filter in sometimes. As such, I'm not going to name any names and haven't named any previously.

It started, within fifteen minutes of me posting the FAR, with someone stating false facts to accuse me of forum shopping. To cover what happened, I had opened a Fringe Theories Noticeboard post, had quickly been told it would be better to open a WP:NPOVN post and a featured article review, and so deleted the Fringe Theories Noticeboard post and copied it over to NPOVN. The editor claimed that no responses had been made to the post, and doubled down repeatedly when I linked her to the response I got and explained the true order of events. It's especially bullshit because the text of the other two posts, one of which was almost immediately closed, formed a tiny part of the featured article review, since if I was going to open a featured article review I was determined to properly document it.

I hadn't even finished opening the featured article review at the time, this was rather a problem, especially as at least one other editor copied her accusation as a reason it should be speedy closed. In addition, three talk page regulars quickly called for it to be closed as out of procedure, since, while I had raised the quality of the writing on the talk page before, pointed out issues and had been ignored, and stated that the article's writing was terrible, the featured article review featured me doing a comprehensive and complete detailed breakdown of all the problems I saw with the article, and I hadn't explicitly raised every problem I listed in the Featured Article Review beforehand on the J. K. Rowling talk page.

This calling for featured article reviews to be closed as premature or out of procedure seems to have been the standard action of defenders of the article: It can be seen being used successfully at Wikipedia:Featured_article_review/J._K._Rowling/archive2 and Wikipedia:Featured_article_review/J._K._Rowling/archive3.

Luckily, before it could be closed, a wave of non-regulars came in and began calling for its immediate delisting as a featured article, which, I presume, led to this effort to deal with the article failing to reach featured status not being speedy closed like the previous.

However, none of this set a good standard for the rest of the featured article review. Defending myself against the forum shopping and other wild attacks was rather a problem given I was in the middle of setting up the featured article review page at the time. A few things that should have happened didn't because there was a host of people attacking me, like the talk page notifications about the review opening.

I think the wildest accusation was that I said that a previous featured article review had "added what appeards to be huge copy-pastes from Harry Potter, ruining the article's focus." As it happened, those sections were written for J. K. Rowling, and then copied over to Harry Potter. This isn't a substansive error: The point is that the article spent a huge amount of time talking about the Harry Potter series when there is a more appropriate article and summary style is a requirement for featured articles.

The response? "'It added what appeards to be huge copy-pastes from Harry Potter' can be viewed as an allegation that [names redacted]: (who did most of that writing) breached WP:CWW, or I did when copying text developed on talk in to the article (my high content contribs are because I did most of the WP:CWW from talk to the article, even when I didn't write the text, and I'm fairly sure I never breached attribution). This is a very serious charge, implicating specific editors. Please provide evidence via diffs for this copy-paste on talk so content can be attributed correctly via CWW templates."

But, let's carry on. A month and a half later, and we enter the Featured Article Removal Candidate phase, where it's agreed the article either needs fixed or thrown out. I also badly injured myself around then, falling between a train and the platform, which forced me to have to abandon a proposed rewrite I had agreed to do as a show of good faith. This offer got brought up repeatedly, forcing me to say increasingly forcefully that the rewrite was off the table. I had set out an outline for it, but, with some proposals for a complete structural rearrangement of the article from start to finish, there wasn't much point actually doing it, especially as it really seemed like a trap: Why, given the history of the article, would I believe that it would actually be used or accepted, as opposed to being immediately reverted without discussion?

The rest of the Featured Article Removal Candidacy basically amounts to a proposed rewrite, some work on it being done, the person spearheading it burning out, someone saying they were going to take over, no real progress happening for weeks, and it finally being delisted after a process that took from 4 June to 14 October, with me being expected to be there the whole bloody time, shepherding it.

My first impression of Featured Article Reviews is quite bad, but one example does not show that it's normally this easy to protect a bad featured article. It's also astounding just how many personal attacks on me were allowed to stand without redaction, at worst, being moved to the talk page. Add to this the shutting down of the previous two featured article reviews, and the results of the 2022 one, and I do wonder whether the procedure is really fit for purpose. In theory, giving every chance to save a featured article sounds like a good idea. In practice, giving months for people to try to save it then, with no further announcements, allowing the few people still following the Featured Article Review to decide whether it has been sufficiently fixed is probably a problem. For example, in the end, the votes to close the first featured article review were eight keeps in a period of three days, four months after the review had opened. Is three days of voting really enough without a new announcement?

The problems with the downplaying of Rowling's anti-trans views formed the subject of a 2024 attempt at starting a Featured Article Review, also by me; and one from earlier in 2025. Both were rapidly shut down. The reason for closing those - that there wasn't enough talk page discussion in advance of them being raised - is a strange claim for an article whose talk page consists of people raising those very issues over and over. It feels like the rule of three weeks of warning being given is being interpreted as if the exact text of the future Featured Article Review needs to be on the talk page, but this leads to a situation where the slightest improvement in one point of comtention can be used to block any movement to Featured Article Review. For example, if one says that "There are many problems with excessive detail, such as X, and X gets changed, then the Featured Article Review gets shut down as "clearly this was getting solved through standard editing." If they object to that change, then the person launching the Featured Article Review is a disgruntled editor bringing up things that have been rejected, and the Featured Article Review can be closed. In cases where a toxic talk page exists, seeking consensus is not a productive act. It needs fresh eyes.

As I've said, J. K. Rowling may be an outlier. But it's not a great impression of a process that I hadn't really engaged with hitherto.