Some pages never reach a discussion at all. A proposed deletion runs its clock for a week, and an articles-for-deletion debate runs about as long, closed by an administrator weighing arguments made in the open. Speedy deletion skips both. One administrator, acting alone, can remove a page the moment it matches one of a short list of criteria — sometimes within minutes of the page going live, before its author has finished the infobox.
The criteria are deliberately narrow, and two of them account for most of what a corporate or biographical page runs into. A7 covers pages that make no credible claim of significance or importance — no assertion, however unproven, that the subject might matter to anyone beyond itself. G11 covers unambiguous advertising: text written to promote its subject, which would need to be rebuilt rather than trimmed to read like an encyclopedia entry instead of a brochure.
Credible claim of significance sits well below notability, and the distance between the two is the point. It does not ask whether independent sources exist, only whether the draft asserts something — a role, an achievement — that a reasonable editor would want to check before dismissing the subject outright. A biography stating that its subject founded a company later acquired for nine figures clears A7 easily, sourced or not. Whether that claim holds up once someone actually looks at the sourcing gets settled elsewhere, later, if it gets settled at all.
A speedy deletion criterion must be narrowly defined and objectively determinable; before applying one, an administrator must be confident the page qualifies beyond serious question, and any editor may contest the tag before it is acted on.
G11 runs on a different axis, and sourcing does not rescue a page from it. An article can cite six reliable publications and still be removed under G11 if every sentence still reads like the subject's own newsroom wrote it — the objection is to tone and intent, not to evidence. Rewriting from the sources upward, rather than editing the promotional draft down, is usually the faster way back.
The deletion log records which criterion applied, and that single line is worth reading before touching anything else. A page removed under G11 needs a different rewrite than one removed under A7, and a page recreated without addressing the original objection often meets G4 — deletion as a repost of previously removed content — just as fast as the first version did.
Clearing the tag proves only that a page cleared the lowest bar the encyclopedia sets. It says nothing about the discussion the same article would face at articles for deletion, and treating the two as equivalent is how a page that dodged speedy deletion turns up there a month later, no better prepared than the day it was first tagged.
