2009/4/11 Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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The nominal time has been five days "or so" for quite a long time, but discussions have often been left a day or two longer due to lack of interest, or no-one being around to close it, or what have you. I remember it used to be routine for there to be a day's backlog or more of unclosed discussions.
In recent years, it's become more and more common to explicitly extend the discussions for particular articles, because they hadn't received many comments - to pick a random day, April 5th, there were 92 discussions, of which just over 40 had been relisted for a second five-day period, and one which had been relisted *twice*. So that's (roughly) half the articles getting five days, half getting ten.
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The relisting at day 5 is a feature, not a bug. It brings the discussion back to the top of the list two days earlier than it would if waiting 7 days, thus more likely to draw the attention of other editors. The fact that somewhere between a third and a half of AfDs need relisting tells us that the problem isn't the length of time an article is on AfD, it is that there aren't enough eyes on AfD.
My greater concern is that the discussion to change the length of time an article is on AfD was held on an obscure page that few watch. It's just a little to "inside baseball" from my perspective, and several of the participants in the discussion are well acquainted with other locales where it is pretty traditional to advertise discussions that will affect the project as a whole (as opposed to only a particular wikiproject or narrow area).
Risker