No one says to toss the New York Times, I explicitly acknowledged, in my above post, that there are sources that name Rand a philosopher.  However, there are many other sources that do not give her that designation.  Simply calling her a philosopher would ignore the multitude of sources that do not call her as such.  As far as the articles that you are citing for precedent, none of them are featured articles.  When we look at other Wikipedia articles, we only look at the ones that have reached Featured Article status.  These are articles that meet certain criteria of excellence.  We can look at other articles for ideas, but they are by no means precedential, as they lack one or more of the criteria that make for an excellent article.