What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

Currently, each article has a prominent private/public toggle, easily accessible from the UI in many places. However, that distinction only matters for public worlds: There, public articles are visible to all, while private articles are only visible to their assigned subscriber groups.   For private worlds, the situation is unsatisfying. Making an article public is not enough to make it visible to anyone -- it seems the world's privacy setting overrides the article's for the actually rendered view, landing any non-editor/owner visitor on the multipass page.   Even that seems a little buggy, though, because aspects of the UI are affected by an article's public/private state in private worlds. So far I've noticed that public articles appear as results when typing in the search box (whereas private ones do not), and that links to public articles are rendered as links (whereas links to private ones appear as plain text). Trying to navigate to the search result or link lands the user on the multipass page.   My suggestion: Interpret an article being public as "any subscriber group can see this". The overall world, if private, is only visible to subscribers in the first place; within that constraint, having "public" mean "any subscriber" fits great. Another way of phrasing this is: Public articles should not impose additional access control restrictions, beyond what the world imposes.

How does this feature request address the current situation?

It seems like the current situation is so confusing that nobody can be relying on the exact behaviour. In addition, the suggested interpretation for what we would mean by saying that an article is public in a private world seems very natural. It would retain useful functionality for the pervasive public/private toggles in various UIs.   The main workaround today is to create a "Public" subscriber group which contains all subscribers of the world, and manually assign it to each article that should be public. That is viable, especially in combination with setting that group as default for new articles, but it isn't as nicely integrated in the UI as the public/private toggle.

What are other uses for this feature request?

My main rationale for this is easily managing visibility: I find that there are many articles in my world (backing an RPG campaign) that I want to consider "public/common knowledge", and many that are actually specific to individual groups. However, making the public/private toggle useful for private worlds would unlock additional synergies when that feature is improved. For example, there is a feature request for allowing the default new article visibility to be private in public worlds; making that a setting for all worlds, once the public/private distinction at the article level makes sense, is very natural.