John Lee wrote:
Telling people to cool it won't solve anything, from my experience -- especially in a volunteer project. As I've been saying on [[WT:AFD]], we need to reduce the volume on AfD so people:
- Don't get stressed out and all tense from voting "delete" on a dozen garage bands, and carry this attitude over to possibly valid article deletion debates;
- Are able to devote more time to reviewing the points of fact on each controversial debate, and thus come to a more reasoned conclusion;
- Don't have to worry about brevity for the sake of ensuring all "nn bio" articles are deleted -- many AfD regulars keep their comments brief because they have to spread their attention over almost 200 debates everyday.
My favourite suggestion is to simply extend the duration of an AfD listing to a month. Takes the time pressure off, allows plenty of time for lengthy discussion and fixing of articles that need it. Since the rate of inflow and outflow doesn't change this would have no significant impact on the "backlog" aside from a one-time expansion of about three weeks' worth of AfD listings (not much in a multi-hundred-thousand article work).
Further changes to AfD may still be needed but this strikes me as a reasonably nondisruptive first step.