How long does it take to get a Wikipedia page approved?

Wikipedia approval timelines vary widely and are not controllable from outside the platform. The two main paths, Articles for Creation (AfC) and direct mainspace publishing, involve very different trade-offs between speed and protection.

The two publishing paths

• Articles for Creation (AfC): A draft is submitted and queued for an uninvolved volunteer reviewer who evaluates it against Wikipedia’s notability and content policies before it moves to mainspace. This adds time but provides a layer of protection against immediate deletion challenges.
• Direct mainspace publishing: A sufficiently experienced editor can move a draft directly to mainspace, where it goes live immediately, but it bypasses AfC review entirely and can be nominated for deletion the moment it appears.

AfC timeline: what drives it

• Routine cases (clear notability, clean sourcing, neutral tone): typically a few weeks.
• Borderline cases (notability questions, thin sourcing, or reviewer pushback on specific claims): several months is common, as reviewers may request additional sources or flag issues iteratively.
• Disclosed COI submissions: reviewed against the same standards; promotional or marketing-style language can result in decline or requests for revision regardless of disclosure.

What happens if AfC declines the draft

1. Decline with feedback: The most common outcome for a borderline draft. The reviewer leaves comments explaining which policies are not met, usually notability or sourcing. The draft can be revised and resubmitted.
2. Revision and resubmission: Strengthen the sourcing, address reviewer concerns, and resubmit. There is no formal limit on resubmissions, but repeated declines on the same grounds signal that the notability bar may not yet be met.
3. Stalled draft: Drafts not actively edited or resubmitted may be tagged and eventually removed from the Draft namespace after a period of inactivity, though they can be restored if work resumes in time.
4. Deletion review (WP:DRV): If a draft or article is deleted and there are grounds, a procedural error in the original decision, or significant new notability evidence that has since emerged, the community can revisit the deletion through the formal deletion review process.

How Five Blocks handles timelines

• We use the AfC path for COI-adjacent engagements because it provides a structured, policy-compliant route to mainspace and reduces deletion risk.
• We communicate a range of weeks to a few months to clients at the start of the engagement and update them on status as the review progresses.
• We do not promise specific publication dates. Reviewer queues are entirely volunteer-driven and outside our control.