Stephen Bain wrote: I agree. People have been saying it is broken for as long as I've been here and it seems to work ok.
Talk to people who don't want anything deleted from Wikipedia, and AFD is marvellous because it is wide open to abuse by them, despite the empty rhetoric about it not really being a vote.
The problem is, I think, that lots of people who comment here don't actually take part in AFD. They don't see the day-to-day crap... they just see a system that keeps struggling along despite being hopelessly broken and unscalable. AFD is such a demented system that it's very often less hassle to just ignore rubbish than even try to get it deleted. No doubt certain inclusionist factions on Wikipedia rather like things that way, and claim it is a self-regulating mechanism rather than a system that cannot cope and which people avoid.