As there has been talk about introducing such a namespace in other
language versions please note that the German community declined to
create one in 2007 already. So in order to have the draft namespace
introduced in German Wikipedia we would need to hold an RfC again
(which I, for one, would reject because we already have a user
namespace for that which is the usual way to use, and IPs will be
happy to use pages under Benutzer:Artikelstube for creating new
pages).
Yeah, I should explain more regarding our plans for future rollout....
We are interested in supporting drafts because we think it can lessen the number of brand new editors who leave disappointed because their articles were quickly deleted. The theory is that, by giving people time to develop articles more slowly, we'll let them learn about the minimum requirements for sourcing, notability, etc. before the article is subject to strict review.
But we don't yet actually know that will improve retention of new articles and new editors. It's a hypothesis that we need to prove or disprove with data. Unless a community requests it, we don't plan to rollout drafts to other Wikipedias outside English until we've objectively proved or disproved our theory. At that time, then we won't need to speculate about whether drafts are beneficial or not in a Request for Comment: we'll know for sure either way.
I do think it's admirable that German Wikipedia avoided creating a mess like the backlog English Wikipedia has at "Articles for Creation". That kind of bureaucracy is very anti-wiki. However, if we can create better software support for drafting articles, then I think it will be a complement to normal page creation that will work for most of our larger Wikipedias. (We probably won't recommend that any small Wikipedias use drafts.)
Regarding the comparison with userspace drafts... if you check out our mockups for future enhancements (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Design_for_Draft_namespace.pdf) you'll see that we're planning a large amount of functionality to assist with drafts that can't be added to user subpages. However, there's nothing preventing a community from continuing to allow userspace drafts alongside the Draft namespace. That's what English Wikipedia decided to do.