The way these things keep going... ah hell, here's an updated version of what I suggested about a year ago:
1. No article may be listed on AFD unless a serious attempt at discussing cleanup, redirection, renaming, etc., has been made on the article's talk page. 2. No article may be listed on AFD twice in the same month. 3. If three (3) users (not IPs, have contributed to article space, had accounts for at least a week, not found to be sockpuppets, yada yada, etc, etc) say "Speedy keep" on an article's AFD, it is immediately closed as "speedy keep". (Abuse of this rule to stifle an actual debate on the merits would, of course, be a violation of policy.)
Note: Copyright violations and other "urgent deletions" (for example, as in a past case, the revelation of the real name, city of residence, college currently attended, and exact place of work of a certain young woman depicted in certain pictures on the Internet under a stage name) should be dealt with outside of the system used for normal articles. Listing something that is not an "urgent" deletion on the page for those should be recognized as a violation of policy.
I don't know why people have to hit over the head with the basics: If an article can possibly be merged or redirected, don't put it on AFD: talk about it on the talk page, use {{mergeto}}, and so on. If an article isn't a copyright violation and doesn't have some other really pressing need to have something expunged from history (cf. example above), then deleting it is not a priority- certainly ranking far below adding content to articles.
-- Jake Nelson