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What is a realistic timeframe to reach consensus or review a topic?

Does marking duplicates hinder fresh perspective on certain topics?

For example, there's a 32-point difference on the topic of bounty text length:

Had this question been marked as a duplicate, would the community have expressed such strong upvote per the original question?

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    It probably wouldn't have. Meta is sometimes a very arbitrary voting machine. However, seeing as community consensus is neither a hindrance nor a guarantee that something will be actually implemented, I'd say it isn't a big problem that this occasionally happens.
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 7:55
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    @Pekka웃 That's a long-winded "6-8 weeks."
    – Grant Thomas
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 8:00
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    Its also because the way the argument has been put forward in both the questions. The older one just says "I think its too many"; whereas the newer one gives compelling arguments to favor the change.
    – Aditya
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 8:12
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    And of course the OP of the latter made a funny with his bounty message. Don't know about the time distribution of the votes, but I wouldn't be surprised if it helped.
    – Bart
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 8:44
  • @Bart: It did help... Before the bounty was started on that question, it had about 9 or 10 net-upvotes..
    – Aditya
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 8:50

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Despite both questions being tagged , I am pretty confident that the difference in votes in the second question is mostly due to:

  1. The arguments given
  2. The humour used in the bounty and the edit

Also, there have been discussions on s with hundreds of upvotes yet, which still haven't been . Recently resparked: discussion on disabling the language filter. Follow the chain of related questions and you will see what I mean.

Conversely, there have been topics which were generally not received well, but have the tag: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-completed?page=436&sort=votes&pagesize=15.

All this to say, up/downvotes probably do not matter too much when it comes to decisions about what gets implemented. It also goes to show that some discussions can drag on forever, spanning multiple questions, while others are concluded on a very short notice. So concerning your first question:

What is a realistic timeframe to reach consensus or review a topic?

About 6 to 8 weeks!

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    You totally dropped the ball at the end.
    – Daniel Fischer
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 9:38
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    To prevent such ball-dropping from happening again, please use the calculator used by SE internally as well: cznp.com/6to8weeks/index.php
    – Bart
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 12:17
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    @Bart Don't worry, I'll get the hang of it in about 6 to 8 weeks.
    – MarioDS
    Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 13:05

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