Add a template, wait a week, delete the page. That is the entire life cycle of a proposed deletion on Wikipedia. No panel convenes. Nobody counts votes. If nobody removes the tag within seven days, any administrator can delete the article on sight, without a second look at the merits.
The process is shortened to PROD on the site, and it exists for cases nobody expects to be controversial: an obviously unremarkable local business, a biography that should never have survived its first review, a duplicate of an article that already exists under a different title. The nominating editor tags the page, writes a short reason, and the seven-day clock starts running. A related process, BLP PROD, applies the same week specifically to biographies of living people that cite no sources whatsoever — a narrower trigger, aimed at the pages most likely to cause real harm if left unsourced.
The only safeguard built into the process is a single click. Any editor — logged in, anonymous, even the subject of the article, writing openly under a declared account — can remove the tag before the week is out, and the deletion stops immediately. No justification is technically required, though a one-line reason in the edit summary heads off an immediate renomination. Remove a PROD once, and that particular article can never be proposed for deletion through PROD again; a second attempt must go through Articles for Deletion, a full discussion where no single administrator can act alone.
The tag rarely reaches anyone beyond the handful of editors already watching the page. It does not email the subject of the biography. It does not surface in a search result. It sits at the top of the article, in a grey box, for exactly seven days, and then it is gone along with the page. An account holder who stopped checking on an article months ago — which describes most of us, for most of the pages we have ever touched — can lose it without a single notification arriving anywhere.
Any editor who disagrees with a proposed deletion may object simply by removing the tag; after seven days, if no one has objected, the article may be deleted by any administrator.
Removing the tag settles nothing about notability on its own. It moves the question, if anyone still wants to pursue it, to a venue built for an actual hearing: Articles for Deletion runs its own discussion, typically seven days as well, closed by an administrator weighing the arguments rather than defaulting to silence. Coverage of the subject, or the absence of it, gets argued out loud there in a way a PROD tag never allows.
Professional practice here is mundane, almost administrative: watchlist everything you have ever touched on the site, permanently, and check the list before the coffee is finished. Answer inside the week, and whatever follows — an accepted objection, an escalation to Articles for Deletion, nothing at all — happens in daylight instead of by default.
