2009/4/11 Al Tally majorly.wiki@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!