Criterion A7 is the fastest route off Wikipedia, and also the easiest to avoid. It lets a single administrator delete a new article about a person, a company, or a band within minutes of its being saved, no discussion required — but only when the text asserts nothing at all. One sentence claiming scale, achievement, or outside notice is enough to close that door. The exact phrase in the policy is "credible claim of significance," and it sets a bar far below the one that actually decides whether an article stays.
The reviewer patrolling new pages isn't checking whether that claim is true, sourced, or even plausible on a second look. They're checking whether it exists. "The company operates in twelve countries and reported forty million dollars in revenue last year" clears A7 with no citation attached — an unsourced assertion of scale still reads as a claim of significance. "John Smith works in marketing" does not, and neither does a page that lists a birth date and a job title and stops there. A7 separates articles that say something from articles that say nothing. It was never built to separate true from false, or sourced from unsourced.
That gap produces a familiar kind of relief. A founder's biography clears A7 on day one, survives its first forty-eight hours untouched, and the client reads the silence as a verdict. It isn't one. New Page Patrol's first pass only screens out the emptiest drafts; whatever gets through moves on to a second, unrelated test — whether independent, reliable sources have written about the subject at any length. A page that claims significance has not demonstrated it, and nobody at the A7 stage was asked to check.
Clearing speedy deletion tells you what the article claims. It says nothing about what anyone independent has written.
Clearing A7 doesn't clear the rest of the queue, either. An article that asserts real scale in promotional language — "the leading provider," "an award-winning innovator" — can still fall to G11, the criterion for unambiguous advertising, on the same read that decided A7 didn't apply. One criterion asks whether a claim exists. The other asks how it's written. Passing the first says nothing about the second, and passing both says nothing yet about notability.
The test worth planning around is the one that comes later, usually at a proper deletion discussion rather than a single reviewer's quick pass: significant coverage, in sources independent of the subject, that discusses it directly and in some depth. A page can clear A7, clear G11, sit untouched for a month, and still lose that discussion for the reason it should have addressed from the very first draft — not a missing sentence, but missing coverage.
