A client's team submitted a company biography to Articles for Creation, Wikipedia's review queue for new drafts, in the depth of winter. The submission notice warned that review could take months, so the team treated the wait as time already spent: a place reserved, an application on file, progress banked simply by having filed it.
No reviewer ever opened it. Six months after the last edit to the page, it was gone. Not declined, not queued behind a backlog, simply deleted under a housekeeping rule that has nothing to do with review order and everything to do with a calendar nobody had been watching.
Any page in the draft namespace that has not been edited by a human in more than six months is eligible for deletion, whether or not it was ever submitted for review.
The clock does not start at submission and it does not care about a backlog. It starts at the last edit, by anyone, and it resets every time a human touches the page. A draft nobody has reviewed and a draft twice declined are treated exactly alike once the page goes quiet: six months of silence is the only fact that matters.
The rule is not a verdict on the subject. A company that will clear the bar in a year can lose its draft to G13 exactly as easily as one that never will; deletion under this criterion says nothing about notability, only that nobody kept working on the page. A version can usually be recovered on request within a further six months, but recovery is not the same as never having lost it, and starting the request is one more thing nobody remembered to do.
So we no longer treat draftspace as a waiting room. Anything we place there gets touched inside the window: a source tightened, a sentence rewritten, a paragraph reordered, something that keeps the page a live document rather than an abandoned one. And if a case is not ready for that kind of ongoing attention, we do not submit it early just to hold a place in a line that, as it turns out, was never a line at all.
