Hi Sarah,
Not everyone views historical figures with the same sentiment, and it wasn't our intention to offend anyone. If the Team had known that this choice for EPOW would drum up as much controversy as it has, we would have skipped it.
A note on how our system works, two months in advance, I look over all the top profiles projects send me as well as historical dates of note, birth dates, and death dates, current events, media events, etc (so I look all over the place) and keep notes. I look over those notes to try to plan out EPOWs, as I call them, or example profiles of the week. I try to vary between US-centric, of which there are many more to choose from on WikiTree, and those from other regions. We have to make sure those people have some sort of image we can use, are connected to the Tree, and are someone we can find reasonable research on in order to improve (if necessary) their biography. It's always nice when a project has already done the work for us, but that often has not happened. We also try to choose people a large swatch of members will recognize. That makes it fun.
Once that is done, I post a note on the profile to let managers and others interested know when we'll be featuring that person so they can make improvements, if they choose. We love when others step in to start spiffing up a profile. I add myself to the trusted list so I can see the activity of the profile and avoid crossing lines and stepping on toes while those others interested work on the profile. That exact situation has been the case with the Davis profile-there was a flurry of activity in the last few days as his profile grabbed attention and I didn't want to make edits until it looked like it had subsided a bit. I have been working on his profile all morning, to try to balance the story, make sure facts are correct, remove extra sections that don't seem to fit or make sense, and so on. I am still not completely finished, but it is much better at this point.
We had no intention of making any uncomfortable. History is uncomfortable. Some people will look up to certain figures as heroes and others as villains, and we try to tread that line lightly.
Would it be beneficial to make an announcement of the next month's list of proposed EPOWs each month, in order to get a feel for the response? Would people like a chance to be able to improve these profiles before we go through them and feature them? We do not intentionally keep the process private; it just happens that way because several tools are in use to keep track of things, including a large calendar full of chicken scratches for notes that I cannot easily share here in its entirety :-) But each month is an easy thing to put out there. And we welcome community feedback. I have asked for ideas for EPOWs in the past, and I keep notes of everyone that is brought up. We just can't feature them all at once, so I have to go through and decide the most appropriate according to dates and current events.