Yes. Wikipedia is fundamentally broken. As a Wikipedia admin since 2003, trying to make basic, intelligent changes to articles that are 'protected' of late has just baffled me. It is very sad that this has occurred to what was previously a strong community. The notion of 'notability' is basically obsolete in these internet days, and should be dropped from Wikipedia's (many and spurious) policies. People that spend their days deleting others' contributions should have to write three times as much accredited content to delete something.

Meta is killing wikipedia. Look at the number of username boards there are - it's bizarre. Just push a list of unaccepted stuff to developers and hard code what isn't allowed. (eg, dotted quads used the be usable as names, but are not any more.)

It's been years since I did AfD, but there were always more than 3 people involved. It's quite easy to participate, incidently, I encourage people to try it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion

People re-submitting articles in AfD until they get their way is a problem. I think either articles should be banned from AfD after being kept, or resubmissions should go through mandatory arbitration process with more eyeballs and longer times to make a decision. Admin power abuse was also a small problem when I did AfD (again, years ago), ie. admins deleting articles when there was no clear consensus or the 7 days weren't over.

Maybe a backoff schedule.

First failed AfD: no returns for 3 months.

Then 6. Then 12. Then 24 ...

How could something that is not worth deleting once be worth deleting at a later point? What is the GAIN of deleting an article?

It seems the only purpose of deleting is to make Wikipedia appear more Serious Business. If Wikipedia TRULY wanted to be a repository of "human knowledge" they could send articles to "Wikipedia Ephemera" and only delete articles that are pure spam. Why not this?

You're defining the problem away (No True Scotsman fallacy). Instead of deleting articles that are not-notable (according to criteria X) you suggest deleting articles that are spam (according to criteria X). In both cases, you'll need some sort of mechanism for performing and reviewing deletions. Many of the articles in AfD are, in fact, spam.

So, the gain of deleting articles seems to be clear to you (you are in favor of deleting spam), it's only the criteria which lead to deletion that are up for debate.

Deletion of something may be worth re-examination/arbitration because both "sides" of the argument may try to game the system, particularly if a negative vote on AfD was eternally valid. Banning further discussion and modification also seems contrary to the wiki spirit.