[WikiEN-l] AFD has gone to a 7 day cycle

[Andrew Gray]

2009/4/11 Al Tally <majorly.wiki at googlemail.com>:

> I wonder when the plan to inform the community was? It might seem like a
> minor change, but it's a significant one. AFD/VFD has been 5 days since,
> what, when it was created? It's a fairly entrenched system. Pointless in my
> view to extend by 2 days. People will simply not remember what they've been
> practising for years.

I agree that in terms of number of people who'll encounter it it's a
fairly wide-ranging change, but I wouldn't get too carried away
calling it "significant" - it's about as limited as a change can be.

No change in policy, no change in how the discussions are carried out,
or what goal they're aiming for, or who participates, or what
standards of proof are used... instead, just how long we get to talk
about it. The only person who really needs to worry about the closing
date of a discussion is the person who closes it; everyone else will
do what they always did.

The change itself is also a bit of a red herring, since practice
doesn't always fit with the apparent policy here.

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.

Conversely, over the same period, there's also been a sharp growth in
people using the "snowball" argument to close a discussion early - so
a proportion of those five-day debates will actually be closed in a
day, two days, three days.

All that considered, I'm not sure changing the nominal time from five
days to seven is actually going to make much if any difference in
practice!

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk