" 2007 (UTC)

Childhood Section - NPOV?
I feel that the childhood section of this article is biased in favour of Phelps.  It is littered with unsourced statements that were obviously added by either Phelps himself or someone else who knows him well such as his family/cult members.  The information on how his mother used to play piano for the pleasure of the neighbours or how he played cornet in the school band but later switched to bass horn is completely unnecessary and colours the section to sound more like a memoir than a biography.  I think this section should be stripped down to include only relevant details about his early life to ensure that the article maintains a neural point-of-view.  

This article is becoming a joke

It's my opinion that Phelps is simply TOO controversial a subject on whom to do an exhaustive encyclopedic biography of a living person.  I believe that 99% of Wikipedians have their hearts in the right places, but I'm very dismayed at the constant changes in this piece.  Nobody knows for sure the motivations of Fred Phelps, yet everyone continues to guess at them.  This in turn makes the entire article riddled with POV.  I propose stripping this article down to the bare minimum.  When Phelps has passed on, historians will be more likely to ascertain his impact on world culture; specifically in the United States.  As it stands now, nobody knows whether he is a religious zealot, grandstander, nut-case, or any combination thereof.  But people keep on guessing, and I simply don't believe that makes for a very good encyclopedia article.  

Disagree with stripping this article down to bare minimum.  He is one of the most controversial figures around today and deserves more detailed coverage.   

Detailed coverage does not mean the same thing as posting opinions.  Documented information or peer-reviewed critique are the key to preventing POV. See Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view - 

 I have to agree with Alex. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a news service or a celebrity gossip page. The article should be stripped down to basic facts which meet the standards of encyclopediac sources. This will make it easier to maintain a non point of view perspective. There are hundreds (at least) of other sites only a Google away which can provide juicier bits.  

Aging Fred
Would it be worth mentioning that most of the administration of the church has been taken over by Fred's daughter Shirley? In Louis Theroux's BBC2 documentary just screened, Fred did nothing but read out prewritten diatribe and seemed to have trouble answering how many children he had when asked. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/noise/?id=louis_theroux  
Only if you can find a reliable source which says that Shirley has taken over day-to-day management of the church. If you have a source for that statement, go for it. '''''' (talk) 

Upon watching the documentary, I felt that Fred did not have trouble answering how many children he had, but was merely expressing irritation at the question, indicating that anyone who had done basic research would know not only how many children he had, but how many were still in regular contact with Fred. Whether that irritation was justified can only be answered by those who were present during Louis Theroux's stays in Topeka. John Warburton 
I think (OR/POV) Theroux was trying to establish whether Phelps counted the 4 dissenting children as his, and Phelps saw this and tried to avoid answering either way.  In any case, I don't consider that the documentary presented any credible evidence loss of faculties (though that doesn't mean that he's mentally stable). 08:42, 3 October"