Neil Harris wrote:
A generalization of this problem is all the other request queues for human action that will soon scale beyond the ability of people to cope with by mere editing, like cleanup, RC patrol, etc.
I'll point out that "Votes for deletion" was originally a software feature. From any page you could go to the 'Vote for this page' special page, and add a comment which would be inserted in the lists on 'Votes for deletion', 'Votes for rewrite', 'Votes for NPOVing', and a couple others.
It was a little rough around the edges, but Lee didn't include the feature at all for phase 3 and the vote pages became utterly unmanageable manually. Votes for deletion survived into the present monstrosity, while the others eventually died of neglect.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)