For what it's worth, the stuff that passes for discussion on the AfD pages makes me wonder if something like the Scholarpedia model for articles is the better way of doing things.
Much of the stuff that passes for discussion on some of the more contentious pages makes me wonder about the whole process. See Talk:Danah_Boyd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Danah_Boyd) for one of the cases that made me realize that the editor process is broken.
