Deletion discussions run for at least seven days, and nothing in Wikipedia's rules freezes the article while the clock runs. Editors can keep improving it — adding sources, cutting unsupported claims — right up to the moment an administrator closes the discussion, and the habit has a nickname among the regulars who do it: WP:HEY, after the plainest kind of comment that stops a debate cold. "Hey, this has actually been sourced now."
A local history museum's article was nominated for deletion on its first morning, the nominator's rationale citing no significant coverage and prose that read like a brochure. Two delete comments followed within the hour, each repeating the same two words. On day three, an editor with no connection to the museum found what the original draft had never cited: a twelve-hundred-word feature a regional newspaper had run four years earlier, and a shorter notice in a state historical society's quarterly. Both went in as footnotes, tied to the museum's founding and its collection.
Fixing the problems raised in a deletion discussion is usually a more productive use of everyone's time than arguing about them.
Both of the earlier delete commenters came back. One struck their own line and wrote that they were switching to keep given the sourcing added since nomination; the other left the original comment standing and added a second one underneath, pointing to the same two citations. The administrator who closed the discussion two days later weighed the article as it stood that afternoon, not as it had read on the first morning, and wrote a closing rationale that named both sources directly.
Cosmetic repair doesn't buy the same outcome. Trimming a promotional adjective, fixing a broken citation tag, reorganizing an infobox — all of it leaves an article looking more finished, and none of it touches the one question a closer is actually weighing: whether independent, reliable sources gave the subject substantial attention somewhere already. A delete comment built on the absence of that coverage doesn't move because the sentence around the absence got tidier.
Timing carries almost as much weight as the sourcing itself. An addition made on day six, with no note pointing to it, risks closing before anyone revisits a page they've already formed an opinion about. A short comment inside the discussion — two sources added, see citations four and five — does more work than the citation alone, because it tells the person about to close exactly where to look without reopening the whole debate from scratch.
For an editor with a disclosed connection to the subject, naming the two sources inside the discussion and letting someone uninvolved decide whether to add them carries less risk than making the edit directly. The correction reaches the article the same way either time. Only one version keeps the conversation about the sourcing instead of about who went looking for it.
