Wikipedia talk:Did you know/Archive 35

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

I haven't been on here in a few days so I don't know if this issue has been noticed or not. Two of my articles that were on the mainpage did not recieve DYK credits on their talk page. I myself received notices on my user talk page. The articles were

I just found another missing credit at

talk

) 14:06, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

The admin bot is supposed to do all the crediting, so it's most likely a bot error. I'll look into it more... – RyanCross (talk) 21:41, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Did you know/Darwin Day 2009

Some other editors and I are trying to organize a full day's slate of Main Page material for Darwin Day, February 12, 2009, a la the successful Halloween content. How should the DYKs be dealt with as they are created?--ragesoss (talk) 17:40, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I think it may be a little early to start anything seriously, but creating a subpage is the way to go, and also mentioning it here so active DYK admins know about it. Nearer the time, a section can be made on the bottom of the suggestion page for articles that are suggested. –

talk

) 17:57, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Were all the Halloween DYKs written within 5 days of Halloween, or were they saved up over a longer period? I don't think a Darwin Day set of DYKs would be possible unless we started earlier, and I don't want possible new articles (like the one I'm composing right now) to go to waste. I'd also like to be able to give clear instructions about how to participate before I start promoting this more widely.--ragesoss (talk) 19:04, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

What exactly is Darwin Day? (OK I know what it is, but my point is many may not know) This trend could grow into ALL of our DYKs being for some day or another, so we would want to be careful about that I would think, no? ++Lar: t/c 20:39, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Darwin Day is Darwin's birthday, but 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species and Darwin's 200th birthday. It's something for which there are major celebrations and related events that have been in the planning for years. If enough date-specific DYKs could be produced to do that kind of thing every day, why not? But it seems to me that most things that aren't pretty broad (like evolution and history of biology, the main focuses of Darwin Day) wouldn't be able to generate enough hooks.--ragesoss (talk) 21:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I think Halloween worked because there was less notice than usual and the hooks were kept on the dyk suggestions template. Suggest that using the template means that there is only ever one running at once. Darwin day? Good idea .... but maybe after xmas? Victuallers (talk) 22:40, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't know, do we really want to use up a bunch of perfectly good nature hooks on a single day? Is Darwin Day so well known or important that people are even likely to realize why there are so many hooks on a particular topic?

There must be a very large number of days commemmorating one thing or another. We can't cater to them all. Gatoclass (talk) 05:05, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, but it's not just a day commemorating something, it's a bicentennial. That's clearly more significant. Plus tying DYK into a major scientific celebration (of which there aren't really that many) does send the message that we take ourselves seriously. --JayHenry (talk) 05:26, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it should be nothing but Darwin stuff all day, to the exclusion of everything else...that would kind of stink. But maybe something like at least having a Darwin hook in the top slot for each of the 6 flips that day (or 4 flips...or however often we're flipping come February) would be cool. —

talk/_contribs

23:48, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize it was a bicentennial. In that case I guess it would be reasonable to acknowledge that in some way. Politzer's idea above sounds reasonable to me. Gatoclass (talk) 07:27, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

The plan is to have history of evolutionary thought as TFA for that day. And there are so many possible topics related to evolution and history of biology that haven't been written yet, and enough active editors who write about that kind of thing, that I think more than just 6 DYKs (one for each update) is feasible. The content would be varied enough (people, places, organisms, concepts, publications, and spread over at least 2 centuries) that I don't think it would "stink" any more than it did on Halloween.--ragesoss (talk) 19:41, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

I wasn't paying attention on Halloween so I don't know exactly what was done, but in any case, I don't think it would be fair to the rest of the hooks if we were to devote an entire day to nothing but biology-related hooks, even if it is a wide variety of biology-related hooks. Giving the top slot to biology hooks all day long would have pretty much the same effect, without monopolizing DYK. And if you have more hooks than that, then we could have something like 4 biology hooks with every update; again, that would have just as much effect, but it would still leave room for boring hooks about highways and lists of coaches and all that stuff. (And, of course, also for the interesting hooks that are what keep me coming back to DYK and slogging through those boring ones.) There's just no need to take up the entire DYK template all day long. —

talk/_contribs

03:09, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

How is it unfair to other hooks? They'll just run the next day. How is it unfair to a list of coaches to run on a Wednesday instead of a Tuesday? Nobody is suggesting that we'd scupper otherwise valid hooks to allow for this. --JayHenry (talk) 04:05, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

• I don't know if I care for this idea. I prefer limited use of setting aside days, and this doesn't seem to be so significant as to set a whole day aside for it. Wizardman 03:58, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

  Are there other scientific milestones you feel are more significant than Darwin's Bicentennial? Or do you feel that nothing in science rises to a high enough significance to warrant this? --JayHenry (talk) 04:05, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

  Politizer's idea sounds eminently reasonable and doable. —Mattisse (Talk

  ) 04:25, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

  For Halloween DYK 2008, there were a significant number of stubs from which to choose to expand articles. People were motivated. Even with all that, it was difficult to fill up a days worth of DYK noms. It was hard work and took dedication. Darwin Day doesn't seem like something that will motivate people to generate DYK content. There isn't a big clamoring of people in this thread saying "Oh, yea, I celebrate Darwin Day and it means a lot to me so much so that I'll promise a DYK nom." I think this will end up putting out DYKs fire to engage in themed content generation, particularly since

  Wikipedia:April fools. Is there any reason why WikiProject Biology can't take the lead on this rather than DYK? If there is coordinated content generation for DYK to appear on February 12th, then there is no reason why DYK wouldn't let that content have access to the Main page. DYK probably only needs a ten day notice to prepare for such an event, not four months. -- Suntag ☼

  07:07, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

• Sounds to me like the future for DYK... Wikipedia's Google doodle!!! In fact, having seen the Wikipedia logo with the Santa hat above, it cannot be too long... --➨Candlewicke  ^{:) Sign/Talk} 21:09, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Per MediaWiki talk:Editnotice-11-Did you know, the DYK symbols were added to appear when editing a section at Template talk:Did you know. -- Suntag ☼ 23:12, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for telling us. Great idea and much more convenience than having to go back and fourth up the top of

T:TDYK to copy the template. – RyanCross (talk

) 21:55, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

That is an amazingly helpful idea. Thank you thank you!!!!! ++Lar: t/c 22:03, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

No editors have been notified that they have DYKs for those currently on main page. Mjroots (talk) 10:09, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I copied the above statement from my talk page. Art LaPella (talk) 19:23, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Think Gato has done them all. Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 19:52, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Resolved

Could someone take a look at

Hook is sitting in the next update queue right now. It was improved to the point where it could be accepted I believe. Chamal ^talk 01:08, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Just to let you know that there is a batch of about seven nominations for 30 November that haven't been reviewed. Jolly Janner (talk) 17:18, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

The surprise of the century! :-D That's perfectly normal; we've had much worse backlogs before. --BorgQueen (talk) 17:28, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Did you know that... Template talk:Did you know has a backlog of seven articles for November 30? Jolly Janner (talk) 17:39, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

talk/_contribs

01:03, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Is anybody allowed to confirm nominations as okay or do I have to be a sysop/trusted user? I'd quite like to help out. Jolly Janner (talk) 22:48, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

(Hello from further along the south coast!) We'd be really grateful for any help you can offer. Just take a look at what others do when they review and confirm hooks, and have a go at doing some. "Regulars" will help and give you advice if needed. Anybody (not just sysops) can review and add comments, and also move hooks to the "Next Update" holding bay. A bot with admin rights then transfers this to a pre-Main Page queue. Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 22:59, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

A bot with admin rights then transfers this to a pre-Main Page queue.: Do I look like "a bot with admin rights" to you? --BorgQueen (talk) 03:39, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

(coming to the rescue) Yes, but only because you make so many good edits so promptly! (phew, that was a close one!) —

talk/_contribs

03:41, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Ahem, I missed out a stage...(!) Moral of this: don't edit just before bedtime, when doing several other things at the same time! Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 08:45, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I've done a few. I hope they're okay. I said a five-fold expansion was okay even though it fell 19 characters short of 2,415. Jolly Janner (talk) 00:40, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, if it's a short expansion it's better to stick to the rules ;) It just needs a sentence or two to bring it up to the requirement. If the article is fairly large and just short of 5X, then it's OK. Chamal ^talk 01:04, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

An easy way to convey the count information is say something like "5X expansion (483 to 2415 DYK characters) verified." It actually works out to 4.96X, so providing then actual character count allows other a chance to object if they want to. I doubt if anyone would under such circumstances (too many other bigger fish to fry). -- Suntag ☼ 03:49, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

This is a new article? How did this wind up on the "did you know" on the main page if the article's been around for a long time (April 2005)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.65.230.52 (talk) 19:31, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

It has been expanded recently. A few days ago it looked like this. Jolly Ω Janner 19:52, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

User:SandyGeorgia left me a message about whether or not I want to write something about the Christmas DYK for the next Signpost. Is anyone interested in writing a Signpost article to promote it? Does anyone have the list of hook that we promoted last year? Gatoclass, I remember how you and I did almost all of the promoting that day. Royalbroil 04:43, 18 November 2008 (UTC), strike out sentence Royalbroil 03:24, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

(message) Royal, you all mentioned the Christmas mainpage at

WP:FCDW/December. SandyGeorgia (Talk

) 19:41, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Do we really want to overwhelm TT:DYK? Advertising on Signpost sounds great at first, but I fear the deluge may be more than we can handle.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 07:07, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

It's Christmas-related only that we're after though. I doubt the current submissions would change a lot. As always, I'd be happy to work on something again. –

talk

) 11:37, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Even if we do get a lot articles through this 'advertising', I don't think the amount will be exactly overwhelming. I like the idea. But maybe there's a risk of flooding the page with too many articles failing the criteria :) If there are too many selected hooks to handle, we'll just have to adjust the time that we keep each set on the main page. We are likely to get more hooks than we did for halloween, so probably we will have a bit of a backlog with the normal hooks, which we will have to work on later. Chamal ^talk 12:28, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, write something about the Christmas DYK for the next Signpost. We can never have too many new articles. As for the noms, Christmas can be handled like Halloween with a section below "Expiring noms" on Template talk:Did you know]] entitled "Christmas 2008". The project will start December 1st. We can put it either in a DYK subpage or reactivate Wikipedia:WikiProject Christmas. ( A past Christmas effort: Wikipedia:Christmas 2004)-- Suntag ☼

I think your first idea is better, under the expiring noms, like we did for Halloween. We can make a subpage like we did for Halloween, documenting possible articles to use (there will be many, many more for Christmas than Halloween), and discussion of things like when it should run, so this page doesn't become too cluttered. –

talk

) 14:55, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, I did my part for the

non-qualifying article already (from 2007, so this answers part of your question Royalbroil), think i'll focus on another christmas related project. --293.xx.xxx.xx (talk

) 22:51, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I struck out one of my original questions as I found some answers. I also clarified that I meant it should be the Signpost article. Thanks for the tip about the defunct Christmas WikiProject. I never heard of it. It's worth a mention in the Signpost article. Royalbroil 03:24, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

The DYK Halloween 2008 effort was followed by the new

Wikipedia:WikiProject Halloween. These seasonal WikiProject may die out off season and pick up diring the season. They probably should be task forces of Wikipedia:WikiProject Holidays so that someone is there year round to tend to them. I do like how DYK expands to include topical article creation efforts, so I'm more in favor of DYK Christmas 2008 rather than using WikiProject Christmas. -- Suntag ☼

08:19, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

If we get a lot of hooks, we could do Christmas Eve or boxing day too. And we can make a bit of an effort to get a couple days ahead in the week before Christmas, by just adding a couple extra noms to each DYK. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 03:30, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Is there going to be any discussion about the fact that we are highlighting a Christian holiday? Are we going to do a

If people are interested they can. Otherwise, there isn't a problem here. If people think there's bias here, they're wrong. There's bias everywhere. If someone wants a Diwali-themed day, then they can propose it. No need to prevent editors from doing something fun just because some like to spoil it with claims of "bias". It's an encyclopedia, not a game. –

talk

) 21:25, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

So, because bias exists and some people unthinkingly perpetuate it, it is not wrong? Wow.

talk

) 21:37, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea why you think there's any bias here. It isn't as if we've said "No, we're not doing a themed day for this day". Anyway, I never said bias was right. It is not right, and if you can show me some proof there is bias on DYK I'd be very grateful. Thanks. –

talk

) 21:41, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I wondered about how a Christmas theme would appear to non-Christians, which is why I didn't push/advocate for it. We have people of almost every description/kind here at Wikipedia. Halloween has an pagan origin (and an occult theme to strong Christians), and you didn't hear these Christians complaining about it (I don't mean me). As far as I'm concerned, if a relatively large group of people want to write hooks for a theme day, then let them. There doesn't need to be an official theme if they plan the days out right in any case. This past year, I've seen plenty of hooks placed on the main page at the right time when the nominator asks politely in their nom. Royalbroil 03:12, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

So, if a large group of people banded together to write hooks about the evils of homosexuality, we should let them do that? The majority rules?

talk

) 03:19, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Actually, there is a lot more objection to homosexuality from religions worldwide than there is to Christmas. But never mind me; I'll go back to copyediting. Art LaPella (talk) 05:36, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

If editors can come together and time the generation of 30+ new/expanded articles for DYK on any topic, why would DYK object? Creation and expansion of articles is the purpose of Wikipedia. If one editor wants to save up their noms and dominate DYK for the day, that's fine as well. (See image on right). -- Suntag ☼ 06:55, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Because bunching them all together into a theme looks like a Wikipedia endorsement. I don't think that allowing one theme to dominate DYK for any one day should be such a cavalier decision.

talk

) 14:51, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

(outdent)While I think there is nothing wrong with a religion-themed day, I do think Awadewit is right that if we only promote themed days for a certain religion then Wikipedia is showing a bias. Looking at the calendar, I notice that Hanukkah takes place during the week that Christmas falls, and Kwanzaa starts on Dec 26, and the Islamic New Year is December 28/29. Since all of these holidays fall very closely together, singling out one of them shows a Wikipedia bias. If we want to have a holiday-themed day, let's include (and advertise for) all of the holidays that fall in that week, especially if we'll be bending the rules a bit on what can be included. Karanacs (talk) 15:07, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I just came to protest the bias here against atheists, deists, agonstics and Satanists. That is all. I will have a Christmas tree production in the United States article ready for the holiday DYKs. --IvoShandor (talk) 15:31, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

And I am kidding, btw, in case it wasn't obvious, I meant to include a winky face but forgot, alas, woe is me. --IvoShandor (talk) 15:32, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

We aren't singling anything out as better or more important. If people want to create a themed day for another holiday, they are free to. We can work on more than one thing at once. I'd rather not include all the holidays. If there is enough interest for Kwanzaa-related articles, they can be given space on Dec 26. I honestly don't see the issue here. Maybe I'll be proven wrong when we get masses of complaints that we're "biased" (we didn't with the Halloween day, so I doubt we will here but you never know...) –

talk

) 18:01, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Halloween is celebrated by people of all different cultures, and it does not represent a particular religion. Same with April Fool's Day - it is celebrated across many cultures and is not affiliated with a particular religion. Christmas, however, is associated with one and only one religion. Other religions also have holidays during the same week as Christmas; by choosing to highlight, advertise for, and bend the DYK rules for only one of these holidays, Wikipedia is showing a bias. My suggestion is that the call for submissions include articles related to Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, and the Islamic New Year. Otherwise, don't allow the rules to broken, so articles would only be eligible if expanded/created December 20-25 (and don't advertise for it). Karanacs (talk) 18:21, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

We made a special effort for Saint Patrick's Day this year, and that's less celebrated that Christmas.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 18:33, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Note: I've posted a link to this discussion at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Christmas-themed_DYK and Talk:Main Page#Christmas-themed DYK. Karanacs (talk) 18:31, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Can we have a "Hannukah+Kwanzaa+Islamic New Year+Christmas"-themed DYK week? Happy Holidays! --PFHLai (talk) 19:41, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps we can allot certain days to certain holidays. Spencer^T♦C 21:11, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

On this date is over on the right. Trying to keep track of all the holidays and religious festivels for DYK isn't worth the hastle.Geni 18:19, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I think Karanacs solution is a good one.

talk

) 01:44, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Fine with me. It was merely a suggestion we had a Christmas theme. I wouldn't have bothered if I knew how much fuss it would cause. –

talk

) 01:46, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

(Haven't read the discussion properly, just voicing my opinion for what it's worth.) I don't like the idea- it opens the gates to having other holiday themed DYKs, which sort of defeats the point of DYK to show off new articles. If people want to write a load of Christmas themed topics as new articles and they are placed there in the usual way, that's obviously not a problem, but I don't feel that we should give them preferential treatment. J Milburn (talk) 10:10, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

• I believe having only Christmas themed DYKs is not neutral, so I support the comment made by Witty Lama on the village pump that we should accept articles related to all festivals that fall in the period near Christmas to avoid bias. - Mgm|^(talk) 13:10, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Of course, no one is stopping someone from starting a similar DYK project about another holiday, but I think having too many special topic days in a short period of time would be discriminating against regular DYK entries (since it would mean they'd very likely not make the main page because of it). - Mgm|^(talk) 11:05, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I think there is some merit in this idea if all desired holidays are included in an unbiased manner. I do feel, however, that certain bias exist when it comes to including DYKs at certain times. A recent experience I had was trying to include what was a treble DYK of Bertie (TV series), Haughey (TV series) and Mint Productions on the day that the first was broadcast. It was pointed out that this was akin to advertising which was fair enough. However, since the show was already going to be on anyway and anyone who would have watched it would presumably have heard about its broadcast, it seemed extreme to me. In the same week as the above we had the Barack Obama/John McCain double featured articles, in a further politically-related bending of rules. I did not have a problem with the idea of this but it seemed to contradict what I had been told and advocate a political and almost racist bias for and against certain nations. In relation to the holidays mentioned in this discussion, they all (even the religious ones) seem to be being promoted on the basis of how commercial they are. Halloween, Christmas and even Saint Patrick's Day are very far up the list of commercialised festivals in both Ireland and the United States to name two countries. I have never experienced any such secular advertising of the Islamic New Year (I've heard more on the Chinese New Year) or any events related to either non-Christian or non-secular festivals. But this ought not to inhibit their relevance and their importance. If Wikipedia is so thorough on the rules in relation to advertising (apart from, of course, US presidential elections) then the inclusion of all requested DYK rule bendings ought to be enacted to maintain neutrality, not just for overly PC reasons. --➨Candlewicke  ^{:) Sign/Talk} 11:38, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

• Before too much more time elapses, can you all provide a final decision on the status here? If we're going to do anything at all for the December holidays, we can adapt
  Wikipedia:FCDW/December to whatever you all decide and run it in the December 8 issue; December 15 might be getting too late, so it's crunch time here. SandyGeorgia (Talk
  ) 19:17, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

I have a feeling that the Saxbe fix DYK nom is going to get 5,000+ Main Page hits. List your guess below to the number of hits while the hook is on the Main Page. Who ever is closest to the actual number gets to pick any new topic and a new article will be created for the topic and the othe rparticipants in this contest each agree to contribute at least one referenced sentence to such an article (we might even set a creator credit record in the process). The contest closes the moment the hook is listed on the Main Page. -- Suntag ☼ 07:36, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I thought that as soon as I saw it ... it's one of those where you just have to click and find out more! Hassocks5489 (tickets please!)

• 6,400 hits. -- Suntag ☼ 07:36, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
• 10,200 hits. Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 08:58, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
• 7,253 hits. -- Might as well give it a shot. \ / (⁂) 11:25, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
• 12,000 hits. I'm
  Mailer Diablo
  and I approve this message! - 07:03, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
• With
  WP:DYKBEST in mind, I'm thinking more along the lines of 16,000+ hits. Jamie^☆S93
  18:29, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

• I know it's already on the Main Page, but I still want to give a shot. :) Maybe 33,000? – RyanCross (talk) 21:53, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

• According to the stats, the article got 28,400 hits yesterday, so RyanCross wins. (since the hook continued to stay on Main Page for a half an hour today, the total number will slightly rise.) --BorgQueen (talk) 00:25, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

• The contest closed at 18:25, 29 November 2008, so it appears that Mailer Diablo was the winner with 12,000 hits being the closest to 28.4+k. -- Suntag ☼ 00:37, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Okay, here's the new topic. I've been thinking of it for quite some time but haven't got the time to writing it. The good news is that there is a well-established Wikipedia article in another language. The bad news is that though it is a well-known culture, it is something that is unique in the country.

It's

Japanese railways

before, you would probably heard a song, tune or melody before train doors close and moving off. In other countries, operators usually use a buzzer to warn passengers of departing trains. (Tip : Use a translator!)

Perhaps we start off at a sandbox. I'll drop by to add content myself when I can. Happy editing! - Cheers,

Mailer Diablo

14:31, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I started the draft article at User:Suntag/Train melody. I think the topic is doable. I'll put my initial thoughts and research on the talk page of that draft article. -- Suntag ☼ 15:14, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I know absolutely nothing about music. I have added a sentence about a gadget that plays the melody for you, but I'm not sure how much more I can help. :) \ / (⁂) 21:13, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

• The article now has been created per Mailer Diablo's request at Train melody. -- Suntag ☼ 15:15, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

On reviewing User talk:Ameliorate!, it appears that Ameliorate!'s enthusiasm is waning. I thinking that part of this is due to his efforts to improve DYK via his bot. With any new effort, there will be bugs to work out. Ameliorate! seems to be taking a lot of heat for his efforts and probably could use some words of encouragement. Thanks. -- Suntag ☼ 19:23, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Ameliorate! has not yet received a Template:The Bot Builder Award. So if you were looking for something to post, that might help him out. -- Suntag ☼ 14:50, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Done! Ameliorate! has frequently bailed me out when I've had technical troubles, so I feel I owe him at least an award, if not a first child. —

talk/_contribs

15:46, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I sympathize, but I don't think that a thoroughgoing cleanup can be presented as a "new article." --Orlady (talk) 23:30, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate the sympathy but I think I'll be able to muddle through without an LSDYK.  :-)

talk

) 23:42, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

No this has been raised before - except I think removed copyvio is not counted, on the grounds it was never legitimately there - is that right? Otherwise 5x expansion is needed. Maybe you should see if it was a copyvio; in the art field "OR" quite often turns out to be directly ripped-off from a major museum :) Johnbod (talk) 01:27, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Copyvio is not legit text, so I think Johnbod is correct. OR is in need of clean up text. You can't knock it down to a stub and have that stub count as your 5X expansion point. However, if the article was knock it down to a stub by someone without DYK in mind and you happened upon the article and then expanded it, then I think the stub would be the 5X starting point. -- Suntag ☼ 03:06, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

"Unwritten" Rule A3. Art LaPella (talk

) 05:20, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello all. I was wondering whether we should be looking at renaming the Next Update section/page, considering under the new system the next update may be as far back as 6th in line. I can't think of a good title at the moment, but if anyone else cares to have a shot? \ / (⁂) 04:54, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

"Next update" seems fine to me. It's the first place where the hooks go after

T:TDYK. If we did decide to change the name, I have no idea what to change it to. – RyanCross (talk

) 21:46, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm having a brain fart now, but what's the name they use in film for the place where the film goes to get edited? Like, the cutting room or something. I dunno. It'll probably dawn on me when I'm in the shower or biking or something and don't have anywhere to write it down. —

talk/_contribs

17:29, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Or maybe I was thinking of "the drawing board." I don't know. —

talk/_contribs

16:36, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

How about prequeue? -- Suntag ☼ 09:12, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Having been actively engaged recently in adding hooks to the next update, I am detecting a slowdown in the supply pipeline. I wonder if it would make sense to change the schedule for the robotic updates for a little while... --Orlady (talk) 23:30, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Is the slow down in the vetting of the hooks or actual number of hooks? If it is the actual number of hooks, we can get more from User:AlexNewArtBot/GoodSearchResult. If it is the vetting, I can put more effort into it and see if I can round up a few more hands. -- Suntag ☼ 03:08, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Both the nomination process and vetting process are not keeping up with the robot. I think it may have something to do with holidays and with university students' exam schedules.
The slow pipeline also may be adversely affecting the way vetters prioritize their activity. Several of the suggested hooks currently on the suggestions page have serious problems. However, possibly because these few hooks are the only suggestions approaching expiration (the others having been "taken" earlier), vetters are spending an inordinate amount of effort on those problematic hooks, instead of looking at newer suggestions, mining the search results, etc. --Orlady (talk) 15:56, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I think Orlady means a slowdown in the number, I find it hard to tell now they all have their own header, but I too get the impression the selection is very thin ATM. It might be an idea to go back to just promoting half a dozen hooks per update for a while. Gatoclass (talk) 13:37, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I believe the main cause of the problem is that the robot is enforcing an update every 6 hours, which is making them more frequent than they ever actually were in the past, and the humans aren't keeping up. Because the pace of volunteer activity (to create articles, nominate hooks, and review hooks) fluctuates, the frequency of updates should be flexible to match that pace. Including just 6 hooks in each update is not a good solution, since it basically means leaving blank space on the main page. Better to expose each hook a couple of hours longer... --Orlady (talk) 15:49, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about others but for me at least Orlady's earlier guess was right on the money: exam schedules and stuff like that. From what I can tell we still have lots of nominations, but not as many people verifying them (and normally the weekend is the time when I go through and verify like a million at once, but this weekend I had to schedule myself a several-hours time slot devoted to banging my head against the wall over a proposal). I thought scaling updates down to about 6 hooks would have be great...in addition to allowing us to stretch our resources more, having fewer hooks seems desirable for its own sake, since they'll get more attention .... leaving blank space is a good point, but was there a solution to that before? When I started here two months or so ago we were in the middle of a giant backlog and I remember you guys purposely ramping updates up to 8 hooks from whatever it was before, so I was under the impression that fewer than 8 quotes was the status quo and 8 was just a temporary thing...maybe I'm mistaken about that. —

talk/_contribs

18:47, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Although come to think of it, I don't see anything wrong with giving the hooks longer time either. What if we had the bot flip them every 8 hours? —

talk/_contribs

19:12, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I wanted to note that I have started putting forth DYK sets for Milton's 400th birthday, 9 December 2008. I talked to some DYK admin and no one seemed to have a problem: I am putting forth a set of DYK that are intended to run one set per DYK block during each period spanning December 9th (5 periods, starting with midnight on Wiki time to the block following midnight for December 10th to have one block spanning into timezones that are still on the 9th). Each will be under 200 characters on their own with the request that a phrase, such as (born 400 years ago today) be included in addition (thus, possibly making it go over 200 characters). A 400th birthday is rare, especially with the second most important English poet. Since there will be many birthday celebrations on this day, I feel that it shouldn't be too problematic to invoke IAR and have these DYK run in this pattern across December 9 so that Wikipedia can celebrate his birthday also, especially seeing as how Wikipedia was lacking a lot of information on Milton previously (seeing as how there are thousands of books and tens of thousands of articles on various aspects of Milton's life, poetry, politics, religion, and influence). If any more information is needed, please ask on my talk page (my talk page includes a list of pages that are potentially being worked on for this purpose). Thanks. Ottava Rima (talk) 20:32, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Link to where they are found for easy reference. Ottava Rima (talk) 20:45, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Maybe I'm just going a little crazy, but I feel like I am getting into edit conflicts at T:TDYK way more than I ever used to, even though I'm editing less frequently than before and [I like to think] more quickly. Has anything about the format of the page or the way section editing works changed? Or is anyone else getting into edit conflicts left and right? Just wondering.

I guess it's most likely just a weird coincidence. —

I've been asked what's the status of the Signpost article on the Holidays/Christmas DYK article. I stopped working on it because there seems to be plenty of opposition about doing a DYK theme. I'd call it no consensus. What should I say to the Signpost people? Royalbroil 01:13, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

DYK sponsored themes are out; DYK won't be using DYK subpages to generate themed content. However, if Wikipedia:WikiProject Holidays/Christmas task force want's to put together 24 hours worth of DYK hooks to be presented on December 25th, it would seem reasonable that DYK will assist them in this. The same is true for any other project willing to put together 24 hours worth of hooks. A purpose of DYK is to reward content generation, not take sides on it. In any event, it is up to the DYK admins as to what appears on the Main Page and DYK is here to present the admins with Main Page choices. -- Suntag ☼ 17:03, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

It's ridiculous that this theme won't get a push. Utterly sad.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 17:51, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

It will get a push if Wikipedia:WikiProject Holidays/Christmas task force wants to put in the effort. As for displaying other December 25#Holidays and observances content relevant to December 25th on the Main Page, someone would first need to generate such DYK content and that decision can be made by the DYK admins on December 24th. Deciding now whether or not the DYK admins should select non existing DYK content seems a bit premature and serves to quash efforts to generate content, which is not a purpose of DYK. As far as I'm concerned, I'll support any group for any topic that puts in the effort to generate new content for Wikipedia with a goal of displaying those articles together on DYKs portion of the Main Page. -- Suntag ☼ 18:17, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

I sure hope that Suntag's comment "DYK sponsored themes are out" doesn't apply to every situation. I and others have been under the assumption that April Fool's Day 2009 will follow the many years of precedents and allow new content created during the past year. Numerous hooks were deliberately not featured since last April and their nominators were told that they would be featured on April 1, 2009. Royalbroil 04:17, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Since I've been very busy for the past couple of months I haven't been keeping up with this page as much as I'd like, but date-themed DYKs seemed to be alive and well last time I did check. Suntag (or anyone else), could you point out the discussion where it was decided to drop them please? Thanks! Olaf Davis | Talk 09:51, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Exactly! - there was a query from Awadewit some time ago (were we doing Diwali too) which attracted a few comments both ways, but nothing you could call a concensus. I'd be in favour of doing something as before. Johnbod (talk) 12:14, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

• April Fools' Day 2008 actually was part of the WikiProject
  Wikipedia:April fools and has never been sponsored by DYK. Supported, yes; sponsored, no. The first themed day sponsored by DYK was Wikipedia:Did you know/Halloween 2008. At the time I created that DYK subpage, I thought it was a good idea for DYK to expand into content generation. After Halloween 2008 ended, the idea for Christmas was raised and opposition began. After Wikipedia:Did you know/Darwin Day 2009 was created, I realized it was a bad idea for DYK to use its subpages to sponsor any theme. For one, DYKs subpages could end up looking like this. I think its fine for DYK to support WikiProject efforts as it did with WikiProject April fools. However, DYK should not use its subpages to sponsor themed hooks as it did for Wikipedia:Did you know/Halloween 2008. To make a long story short, DYK Christmas 2008 is alive and well. Just sign up at participants and post your comments at Wikipedia:WikiProject Holidays/Christmas task force/DYK Christmas 2008. We're already two days behind schedule, so enough talk and more article writing. : ) -- Suntag ☼
  13:13, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

So are the nominations going to be made at

T:TDYK as usual or at Wikipedia:WikiProject Holidays/Christmas task force/DYK Christmas 2008? Chamal ^talk

13:21, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Everything is going to be similar to the other themed events, except that the project won't be run from DYK's subpages. Basically, the approach is write the article, list at Template talk:Did you know#Christmas DYKs, project discuss at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Holidays/Christmas task force/DYK Christmas 2008. -- Suntag ☼ 13:30, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Sounds OK to me. In fact, I think collaborating with another Wikiproject would be better than trying to do it all ourselves. Chamal ^talk 13:34, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Is the [mis]spelling of the title ("Ciristmas") intentional, or can we fix it before too many people start getting used to that link? —

talk/_contribs

14:40, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

I've renamed the page. –

talk

) 14:43, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

• I post two lists of suggested articles for DYK Christmas 2008 at Wikipedia:WikiProject Holidays/Christmas task force/DYK Christmas 2008. The first list has some real nuggets, including classic Christmas songs and topics. In looking at over 1,100 articles, I learned that music album = Wikipedia Christmas. -- Suntag ☼ 02:03, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

So if members of

We'd be happy to accommodate you, in the same way we did for Halloween/April Fools. –

talk

) 02:37, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, cooperating with individual WikiProjects which come to us with proposals while not actively seeking out themes to organise ourselves seems like a good plan. Olaf Davis | Talk 12:35, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I've stopped working on the article and I told the Signpost people that there won't be an article. First, it appears that we do not want to be promoting the list. Second, there is too much detail that hasn't been worked out. Someone else can pick up the ball if they want to work on it. Real life has significantly cut down my discretionary / Wiki-time. Royalbroil 13:07, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

As long as the DYK effort doesn't overlap another DYK effort, there should be no problems. Also, count me in. Singapore is under represented in Wikipedia articles. To keep people interested, you shouldn't start the article writting effort too early. I suggest begining recruiting writers on July 12, 2009 and officially open the WikiProject Singapore DYK task force writing effort on July 19, 2009. The topic is broad enough that if we get enough writers, we can get 24 to 36 new/expanded articles, enough to cover 24 hours worth of Main Page posts. Feel free to contace me in July 2009 and I'll give you a hand with the task force. -- Suntag ☼ 09:03, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest. I will keep you informed. Finding writers would be tricky, though. --J.L.W.S. The Special One (talk) 03:36, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I'll try to put together a list of article writers interested in DYK theme projects. Maybe we can create a category, userbox, etc. That way, it will be easier to find them. -- Suntag ☼ 07:20, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

War on Christmas!!! Buncha godless heathens. Someone needs to put some good old fashioned fear of the JEBUS into the Wiki, how can we not cram Christmas down everyones throat, what with the war on and all. ;-)--IvoShandor (talk

) 08:42, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

It's off the main page now. Adminbot just updated the template with a new set of hooks. And the hook had been corrected, see here]. Chamal ^talk 03:57, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow. Did you know that I had been looking through the main page at 03:44? -_- Thanks Chamal! —Ed 17 ^{(Talk / Contribs)} 04:07, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I actually noticed and commented on that mistake while the article was still on the suggestion page (at 15:22, 6 December[1]). Weird that it still went through unedited. Manxruler (talk) 17:51, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Would updaters please bear in mind that it's normally a good idea to have roughly half the hooks on US topics and half on people topics (and I don't mean in a mutually exclusive sense). About all we have left right now are lots of people/US hooks, because not enough US and people hooks have been getting promoted over the last few updates. Gatoclass (talk) 13:40, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I am not surprised many people are insensitive about this, since some of them went so far to remove your note (Since on average about 50% of hooks on the suggestions page are U.S. related, it is usually appropriate to have roughly half the hooks in any given update on U.S. topics) from the next update page - without realizing the only way to fix the "American bias" is that they supply us with more non-US hooks. --BorgQueen (talk) 13:47, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Also I think we may be running low on hooks. There's a total of only 72 hooks on the entire Suggestions page right now, when you think that a few weeks ago we had more than that many just in the Expiring noms section, I think it's pretty clear we are chewing through hooks too quickly. As I said above, might be an idea to throttle back to six hooks per update for a while. Gatoclass (talk) 15:08, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Rather than lengthening the update cycle to, say 8-9 hours? --BorgQueen (talk) 15:12, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I would much prefer to see the update cycle lengthened. Note that a major effect of having fewer hooks is that there is empty space at the bottom of the DYK section -- and that's not good.
Before the robot started doing updates, the cycles often were longer than 6 hours, with the supply of hooks and the availability of volunteer effort controlling the rate of updates. Now the robot has an appetite for new hooks every 6 hours, and it's not always easy to keep up with that pace. If a human had to "push the button" to tell the robot to start an update, we could pace the update frequency to match the supply of content. --Orlady (talk) 15:41, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, I don't know a reliable way to lengthen the cycle. When we had to shorten it to four hours a while back, it meant manually resetting the DYK time to trick it into thinking it was two hours earlier.

If you know of a reliable method of making it fire every eight or nine hours, fine, but if you don't, 4 updates x 6 hooks is the same number of hooks per day as 3 updates x 8 hooks. Gatoclass (talk) 15:46, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

BTW I am about to hit the hay now so will not be able to respond to any further comments until tomorrow. Gatoclass (talk) 15:49, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Unless the bot creator is willing to give a helping hand, the cycle has to be altered manually AFAIK. Main Page balance can be adjusted by removing one or two items from ITN (which they usually don't mind), so Gato's suggestion seems to be a simpler solution. --BorgQueen (talk) 15:55, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

If we really want to solve this problem quickly, what we could do is just have two 8-hook updates per day. We could do this by double-loading each update into two consecutive queue pages, although the credits section would have to be missed in the second update so that it didn't give out credits twice. Someone would also need to remove the duplicate archiving, but that's an easy job. This solution assumes the bot will work properly if it doesn't find any credits to give out, which I don't know is the case.

What I'd like to see is for us get back to around 160 hooks on the Suggestions page again, then we could go back to normal. Gatoclass (talk) 16:22, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

The idea of double-loading an update unit is interesting, although I expect that DYK would get backlogged again soon if every set remained posted for a full 12 hours. --Orlady (talk) 19:39, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

• There are two ways to fix this. First the bot should be revised to have simple parameters that let the DYK admins specify how often the bot updates. The parameter should be factors of 24, namely, every every 1 hour, every 2 hours, every 3 hours, every 4 hours, 6 hours, every 8 hours, every 12 hours, and every 24 hours. The DYK admins then can change the parameter at will to immediately affect the bot update rate. Basically, we stick with 6 hours, unless we get too many or too few DYK hooks. Also, we can increase the noms taken from User:AlexNewArtBot/GoodSearchResult. I'll try to do this later, but I gotta go. So, later gators. -- Suntag ☼ 18:33, 7 December 2008 (UTC) P.S., I just added a DYK hook that relates to Lamu Island in Kenya (Juma and the Magic Jinn). -- Suntag ☼ 18:36, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

• FTR, I sent an e-mail to the bot owner (
  User:Ameliorate!) asking about rescheduling the bot -- and referring to the discussions here. No reply yet. --Orlady (talk
  ) 19:36, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Ameliorate! -- that should be helpful in both fat times and lean. --Orlady (talk) 01:38, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I've changed it to 28800. --BorgQueen (talk) 03:26, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I think we should change it to twelve hours. When one considers that there are usually about 30 hooks per day, sometimes 40, which means that five days = 150-200 hooks, not including the unused hooks in the expiring noms section, which can also usually run to 30 or so, then we really should have a minimum of about 180 hooks to select from and a max of about 230, but instead we currently only have 70 hooks! So I think the best and safest way to proceed is to wind things right back until we have at least 150-180 hooks again, and then go back to normal. Otherwise it could take forever to get back to having a decent selection of hooks to choose from. Gatoclass (talk) 04:26, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

So fixed: 43200 (3600x12). --BorgQueen (talk) 04:31, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

• In addition, perhaps we can have a bot developed to keep an ongoing count of the number of hooks listed at Template talk:Did you know. All the hooks have level 4 headers and begin with ====[[. so the hooks are easy to find. The results can be posted to a table listed on the top of this page. Manually, I just counted a total of 90, with the breakdown as follows: November 30 (1), December 1 (2), December 2 (1), December 3 (4), December 4 (9), December 5 (28), December 6 (22), December 7 (16), December 8 (7). I think we need about 24-36? per day to feed the admin bot. -- Suntag ☼ 07:43, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That would very handy! However, I have noticed some strange shenanigans on the suggestions page since the new headers were added, which is that sometimes when I click on an "edit" tag I get the wrong article. Dont know why this occurs - could it be the inclusion of DYK ticks in some headers? - but it would be nice to get it fixed before we started thinking about bots to take advantage of it. Gatoclass (talk) 10:33, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

comment I get those same shenanigans sometimes, and I assume it's just because of how section editing works with ID numbers...ie, if you open the page, and then someone else adds or deletes a section above you, and then you click the section edit button, the section ID will now be corresponding to the section above or below, rather than the one you clicked on. (I've noticed that when I get into section-editing shenanigans, the vast majority of the time it's the section above, rather than below, that I get taken to...which would jive with the fact that the majority of the activity higher up on the page is sections getting added, not sections getting removed). As far as I know, there's no way to change that—EXCEPT if we make DYK be formatted more like AfD, by having each DYK hook be a subpage that's transcluded into T:TDYK. (That, though, would create the added problem that when you promote a hook, it would take extra clicks: you'd have to edit the subpage itself to get the hook and nominator and all that good stuff, then edit T:TDYK to remove the nomination).

As for putting ticks in the headers... I started doing that a while ago because I thought maybe it would help draw promoters' eyes to hooks that have been uncontroversially and totally verified or uncontroversially and totally rejected. Recently I have stopped doing that, because I feel those hooks aren't too hard to find anyway, and it just was starting to annoy me because it made the --> section edit link in the edit history not go to the section anymore (because it would try to link to a section called "18px ARTICLE"), but I see the ticks in headers are still being used some. Does anyone have an opinion on whether or not we should be using them? —

talk/_contribs

18:32, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Still currently only 79 hooks. We don't seem to be getting many submissions ATM. This is pretty much the opposite of how it was last December! Perhaps things will pick up a bit when we get closer to Christmas. Gatoclass (talk) 10:57, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

The supply pipeline is filling up pretty rapidly. (Unfortunately, several of the recent nominations are for articles that I saw on the GoodArticleSearch and judged to be poor candidates for DYK... I hope the nominators are seeing good qualities in those articles that I missed...) The 12-hour cycle is too long. Can we shift to 8 or 9 hours?

--Orlady (talk) 03:07, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Changed it back to 28800. --BorgQueen (talk) 04:02, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Do you think would-be nominators are intimidated by the new DYKsuggestion and header formatting? Art LaPella (talk) 17:26, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That thought occured in my mind. --BorgQueen (talk) 18:18, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

(ec)It's possible. I've seen a few edit summaries like "crossing my fingers" or "let's see if this works"...so some people seem to be unsure how to use the template. I think that could be alleviated by adding a simple example (a template of the template_{(whoever first called the namespace "Template:" has made things so confusing)}) in the edit notice...but right now the edit notice is pretty big already, with the various ticks and everything.

One thing we could maybe do is add a Nominate an article link at the top of each section...it could do the same thing as the edit section link, but have a different edit notice (instead of the edit notice that has all the stuff for reviewing DYKs, it could be specially made for people nominating them, and then would have space for slightly more specific instructions, such as "Add your name in plain text, not your ~~~~ signature."

Or, of course, we can make the template simpler. Any suggestions people have would be welcome; I have already left a message at Template talk:DYKsuggestion about possibly removing some parameters that are complicated and possibly unnecessary. And, if the template is overly complicated, we can always just get rid of it—I won't be offended or anything, it was just an experiment. From what I can tell, the majority of nominators are using it now, but that doesn't mean they like it; maybe we could do a quick straw poll or something.

As for the header formatting...it's always possible that people are intimidated by it, but personally I think it's much cleaner than what we had previously, and it's more similar to how things work at XfDs (although in AfD, MfD, and CfD, everything is done by transclusion...I don't think IfD is like that, but I could be wrong). Personally, I think the header format has enough benefits that it's not worthwhile to abandon it just to be less intimidating...if it is intimidating, then our efforts should focus on how to make the header format more easily negotiable, rather than going back to the old way. But of course, that's just my opinion. —

talk/_contribs

18:19, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I think of myself as having a severe case of Template Intimidation, due to an extensive record of messing things up royally (for example, at XfD and SSP) because of my errors in using templates -- and not being able to figure out what I did wrong.
I confess that my first reaction to the new template was "Oh, no, not another templated process!" However, after I tried it the first time, I quickly concluded that the template makes it much easier to nominate a DYK. I have found that it is very easy to copy the template from an existing nomination and fill it in. I think that once people get over the initial intimidation, they will like this template. It's simple and straightforward. However, it does contain some elements that I don't think are needed, namely altusername (whose, and why is this requested?) and movedtomainspace. Rather than removing these from the template, people could just stop listing them. --Orlady (talk) 03:07, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Can I suggest that if the traffic remains low, rather than keep the updates at 12 hours, we instead expand DYK to perhaps reward a broader class of articles. I'd suggest "detagging" articles is something that really needs to be encouraged on a systematic basis. Not sure how we'd define this, but removing all the citation needed and cleanup tags from an article is tremendously important and now's as good a time as any to think about possibly moving in that direction a bit now that the bot seems to have given us some ability to process what we have. --JayHenry (talk) 05:51, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Could somebody please take a moment to boldly verify or reject

Thanks, —

I've looked at it, but I'm afraid I don't understand the article topic well enough to successfully evaluate it. --Orlady (talk) 02:00, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I deleted as all but one of the refs are in-house. Gatoclass (talk) 04:45, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That's fine with me. Thanks for looking into it. —

talk/_contribs

05:57, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for checking it, after some 10 days (although it didn't pass, but still). But I am quite concerned what would be your definition of non-inhouse sources, as I did source several magazines, just curious since that may come in hand in the future. -- クラウド６６８ 06:55, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, you are quite correct, I somehow overlooked a couple of those refs, my apologies. I have restored the entry and will endeavour to find time to review the hook shortly. Gatoclass (talk) 08:16, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I can't believe I forgot that. You're right, Cloud668...it's easy to miss the Dengeki sources in with all the in-house ones, but they are there. Thanks for catching us! —

talk/_contribs

08:28, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with listing the names of hook nominators. However, BorgQueen and Cbl62 are the ones who've been updating that page, so I agree with whatever they decide. -- Suntag ☼ 20:10, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That sounds fine with me. I figured it's probably not necessary to list the names of creators and expanders since it's mostly about what constitutes a good hook, and the hook is the nominator's work. (Of course, now that I think about it, the hook is often an ALT hook that was suggested by some other fine editors, and we don't really have any way of keeping track of that for all the past DYKs...but oh well). —

talk/_contribs

21:39, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I actually thought about that, but that information is very hard to collect on a historical basis. We typically go through the "Archives" to check page views, and the creater/nominator names are not preserved in the "Archives." So, adding the creator/nominator credit would require searching manually through old Suggestions or Next Update pages. If anyone has an idea for how we could collect such information, I'd be open to the idea. Cbl62 (talk) 23:56, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Going forward, it shouldn't be too hard to get the names. As for the archived info, sometimes the article page "What links here" may give a clue as to who received the credit. If you create a column in each of the DYKBEST tables for the names, we can put that on the list of tasks to complete. -- Suntag ☼ 00:10, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I added a [currently empty] nominator column in the all-time table (the first one) just to see what it looks like. If it's got problems (or if it looks horrible on your browser) feel free to revert. —

talk/_contribs

01:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Have the rules been changed, and it's 6 and not 12 hours for each batch now? Manxruler (talk) 07:43, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

The time has been extended temporarily as we ran a bit low on hooks. I'm not sure whether it's currently 8 hours or 12 hours, but I think it's still on a 12 hour cycle. It probably won't stay that way much longer as the number of hooks is rapidly building again. Gatoclass (talk) 13:40, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I guess a lot of people are on holiday right now. Smaller projects like

WP:MOTD have almost come to a standstill. Will be back to normal in a days. Chamal ^talk

13:50, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

BTW, Borgqueen informs me that the clock is currently on an eight hour rather than twelve hour cycle. Gatoclass (talk) 14:21, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that makes sense, I'm leaving too in a weeks time. Running low on hooks, are we? Maybe I should finish a double-nom I've been working on for a while now. Manxruler (talk) 16:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

We're low on hooks? I'll go do some baseball bios then. Or maybe I'll write something else and surprise you guys :P Wizardman 16:53, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Are we low on reviewers too? Looks around guiltily. I haven't been doing much reviewing lately, better get back to it soon ;) Chamal ^talk 16:58, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Per the discussion US and people hooks above, the rules have changed from updates every six hours to update rates specified at User:DYKadminBot/time. The change was made to allow DYK admins more flexibility in responding to too many DYK hooks or too few DYK hooks in the pipeline. As noted above by Ameliorate!, "There's 3600 seconds in an hour so multiply 3600 by the number of hours and you'll get the number of seconds you need (eg. 3600 x 8 = 28800)." 28800 represents an update of every eight hours. Six hour (21600 seconds) updates still represents the norm, but the norm can be deviated from by DYK admin decision. If some admin would be so kind as to place a <noinclude>{{Documentation}}</noinclude> on User:DYKadminBot/time, I would be happy to write the documentation. Thanks. As for the present low number of hooks, I'll see if I can add some more. -- Suntag ☼ 17:03, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Since DYK bot designer Ameliorate! is on break, I posted a DYK hook count bot request. If you read this, Ameliorate!, we need you back! -- Suntag ☼ 20:00, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

About the bot...you will probably want it to count ]]== rather than ==[[ , because the latter picks up the end of a section heading + beginning of an image on the line below (thus possibly double-counting some hooks). Also, there would have to be a way to also count for ]] == , because while the DYKsug template automatically makes the section heading without the space (not for any reason; that's just the way I like them), users nominating without the template might put a space in. —

talk/_contribs

00:44, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Also, right now the section headers for the queue transclusions are also linked (like ====[[T:DYK/Q1|Queue 1]]====), and we don't want those in the count. —

talk/_contribs

00:49, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

According to Politizerbot (don't we all feel like a bot sometimes) there are 143 hooks as of this revision. I didn't do any comparison of verified, unverified, unreviewed, etc... that's just the total number of hooks that have not gone to Next.

I added {{todo|small=yes|9}} to the top of this page 'cause I feel like there are too many fires going to keep track of. Feel free to add to the todo list (for DYK things other than approving and posting to the Main Page). -- Suntag ☼ 20:07, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I wanted to note that there are two Milton DYK sets that are still tagged for the 400th birthday. The next update doesn't have one, so someone should probably remove the tag before they are placed on the main page (unless they are fit in for the next two updates, and then it would be the 400th birthday still). Ottava Rima (talk) 21:20, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! It would be nice to commemorate Kathryn Stott's 50th birthday this way, if it's possible. Sorry for the late addition, I was staggered to find she had no article here already. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:31, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Done. Gatoclass (talk) 05:46, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Gatoclass! Let's hope Stott appreciates her birthday present. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:51, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Great hook BTW. It was a natural for the "funny" spot at the bottom :) Gatoclass (talk) 05:58, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

With any luck, we'll be seeing the hook again in a couple days, on

talk/_contribs

06:08, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, both! It was a bit of a gift when Google told me that the anecdote could be reliably sourced. Espresso Addict (talk) 06:10, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

You might want to take a screen shot of Kathryn Stott's DYK hook appearing on the Main Page on her birthday and then email it to her. You can store the screen shot at Category:Wikipedia Did you know images. -- Suntag ☼ 02:29, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

JayHenry has brought up my abortive attempt to rewrite and summarise the DYK ruleset, which currently exists spread over three separate pages with no particular logic. I've made a dump of the current rules at User:Olaf Davis/DYK rules and some comments on how to proceed on that page's talk page. Feel free to weigh in! Olaf Davis | Talk 11:10, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Move

User:Art LaPella/Unwritten rules, User:Art LaPella/Long hook, User:Art LaPella/No qualifying article, and their talk pages to Wikipedia:Did you know/DYK enumerated rules and provide a note at Wikipedia:Did_you_know#DYK_rules where to file the enumerated rules. Put the rules on top and the Frequently asked questions below. Alternatively, move Art's rules to Wikipedia:Did you know/DYK enumerated rules and Art's Frequently asked questions to Wikipedia:Did you know/DYK frequently asked questions. Provide a comment at Wikipedia:Did_you_know#DYK_rules to the effect that these are incorporated by reference. -- Suntag ☼

18:09, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I haven't used "No qualifying article" lately because the article is now the section header. A similar writeup could be made for the situation where the article isn't mentioned or piped in the hook. So far that seems unnecessary although the situation has come up twice, because neither author had any further misunderstanding after a brief explanation mentioning Unwritten Rule B1. Art LaPella (talk) 19:05, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Could I remind updaters to please ensure that they promote a sufficient variety of hooks to each update as per clauses J2 and J3 of the

Thanks everyone for your co-operation, and your contributions to the project. Gatoclass (talk) 04:18, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Heads up - Wikipedia_talk:2008_main_page_redesign_proposal#Introducing_GA_to_main_page. Cirt (talk) 13:19, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, we've been through this before, and it has ended without proper consensus. The DYK participants have expressed their concerns on how this proposal will go against the objectives of DYK (of promoting new articles and giving them a chance to be improved) and they have presented their views on it. Looks like we'll be doing this all over again. Chamal ^talk 13:38, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... should we join in the discussion there and present our views? What do you guys think? We might suddenly find out one day that there is no DYK section on the main page anymore :) Chamal ^talk 13:57, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I just noticed that thread; right now I'm trying to dig up our latest discussion in the archives to link to it there and point out that the user who seems to be the main impetus behind this new proposal already presented it here and had it shot down here just a couple weeks ago. —

talk/_contribs

16:53, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I suggest we put this up at

WP:PEREN :) Wizardman

16:55, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Cirt. I've weighed in, but given the number of times consensus has been shown to oppose this in the past and, frankly, the massive inertia the redesign proposal has to overcome anyway, I'd be surprised to see this get very near appearing on the main page. Olaf Davis | Talk 17:04, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I think you guys misunderstood, by the looks of the sheer "oppose" generated as a result of User:Cirt's message. There is not a single proposal to remove or eliminate DYK, but to add GA to main page by putting it under DYK or create a section on its own. (Pardon my bold and underlined words, but people seem to jump straight to conclusion without reading the details of the proposal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by OhanaUnited (talk • contribs) diff

I think that we realized that... —Ed 17 ^{(Talk / Contribs)} 18:44, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I posted a response to one of Gatoclass's old comments above, but it's so buried in text that I'm reproducing it here to see if anyone thinks it's totally crazy (or totally awesome, or somewhere in between):

That would very handy! However, I have noticed some strange shenanigans on the suggestions page since the new headers were added, which is that sometimes when I click on an "edit" tag I get the wrong article. Dont know why this occurs - could it be the inclusion of DYK ticks in some headers? - but it would be nice to get it fixed before we started thinking about bots to take advantage of it. Gatoclass (talk) 10:33, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment I get those same shenanigans sometimes, and I assume it's just because of how section editing works with ID numbers...ie, if you open the page, and then someone else adds or deletes a section above you, and then you click the section edit button, the section ID will now be corresponding to the section above or below, rather than the one you clicked on. (I've noticed that when I get into section-editing shenanigans, the vast majority of the time it's the section above, rather than below, that I get taken to...which would jive with the fact that the majority of the activity higher up on the page is sections getting added, not sections getting removed). As far as I know, there's no way to change that—EXCEPT if we make DYK be formatted more like AfD, by having each DYK hook be a subpage that's transcluded into T:TDYK. (That, though, would create the added problem that when you promote a hook, it would take extra clicks: you'd have to edit the subpage itself to get the hook and nominator and all that good stuff, then edit T:TDYK to remove the nomination).
As for putting ticks in the headers... I started doing that a while ago because I thought maybe it would help draw promoters' eyes to hooks that have been uncontroversially and totally verified or uncontroversially and totally rejected. Recently I have stopped doing that, because I feel those hooks aren't too hard to find anyway, and it just was starting to annoy me because it made the --> section edit link in the edit history not go to the section anymore (because it would try to link to a section called "18px ARTICLE"), but I see the ticks in headers are still being used some. Does anyone have an opinion on whether or not we should be using them? —

talk/_contribs

18:33, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't think DYK ticks in the level 4 header are needed since the DYK tick usually appears at the bottom of the section. As for the Section editing shenanigans, it might have to do with the page not being purged. In your preference under the Gadgets tab, there is a User interface gadget that shows a "clock in the personal toolbar that shows the current time in UTC and also provides a link to purge the current page". If we each installed that and purged T:TDYK when we get the chance, that might fix the Section editing shenanigans. Also, perhaps we can have a bot purge that page every so often (every five minutes?). -- Suntag ☼ 20:03, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

• I posted a DYK purge bot request. -- Suntag ☼ 01:41, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The

Well, he had a bit of luck since the hook stayed for 12 hours yesterday. --BorgQueen (talk) 05:19, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

That's a good point...should we be listing hooks in something like views per hour they were up? And maybe having the top 10 overall just for fun? —

talk/_contribs

15:23, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh no, please not that. Before the advent of our beloved automaton, archiving tended to be highly erratic, sometimes done a few hours after an actual update - meaning we have no way to know how long a batch stayed on Main Page except investigating the history of the DYK template itself. Can you imagine how tedious it will be? --BorgQueen (talk) 15:36, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

The trouble there is that there are additional factors, such as the time posted relative to the likely target audience being awake, whether a photo was used, etc. Plus, the tool used to count the hits while the article is on the Main Page also adds in hits before and after the article is on the Main Page. For the "Hooks with over 20,000 views" main table, I think DYK should accept the tool count without qualification to make it easier on all of us. Of course, no one will object if you want to another table at

Wikipedia:DYKBEST, so long as you maintain it. : ) -- Suntag ☼

17:17, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

St Margaret's Church seems to have benefited from the longer run as well ... I've just looked at the stats, hoping it had reached the 800–1,000 hits average figure for one of my Sussex church articles, and saw 12,300! Maybe there was some click fraud going on (!)... Anyway, 71,300 will be pretty difficult to beat. Great to see such a good result. Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 20:46, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Well if it was up for 12 hours there should at least be a note to that effect on the DYK:BEST page. Gatoclass (talk) 15:52, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Currently 143 hooks on the Suggestions page (not including the Xmas hooks). I think when we get back to 170 or so we can probably go back to a six hour cycle. Gatoclass (talk) 06:07, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I just did a count and counted 180. To the count, I opened the Template talk:Did you know page using edit and copied the entire code, pasted it into a MicroSoft word document, highlighted the entire page and sorted to place all the ====[[ on top of each other. Then I highlighted all the lines beginning with ====[[ and used the word count feature. That word count feature showed 180 paragraphs beginning with ====[[. So that makes 180 hooks (I assume). -- Suntag ☼ 02:35, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I just did a manual count of the hooks twice, and I come to exactly 170 (not including holiday ones). I'd say we probably have enough hooks to go back to the regular six hour cycle. Jamie^☆S93 03:10, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Currently around 170 ATM, time to go back to the six hour cycle. Gatoclass (talk) 04:12, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

 Done I've changed it back to six hours. --BorgQueen (talk) 04:48, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I changed the Promoted entries on the TDYK page to level 3 headers so that only the hooks are level 4 headers. -- Suntag ☼ 07:51, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Could an administrator remove the (view pictured) from the second hook in Queue 5? I forgot to remove it when changing the lead hook earlier. \ / (⁂) 11:02, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Done, but that one has already been on the mainpage, I guess I forgot to remove the hook from Suggestions! My apologies, I'll see if I can find a replacement hook. Gatoclass (talk) 13:21, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh heck, I think I'll leave it there. If I move it now it means someone else doesn't get their full six hours on the mainpage. Gatoclass (talk) 13:40, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I just expanded Western New York and Pennsylvania Railroad fivefold, but it's already been on DYK. Will it be accepted again? --NE2 12:17, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

On Feb 1st this year. I don't know if the rules cover this yet, but I think the interval since the first appearance should be a factor. Maybe 10 months is enough. Johnbod (talk) 12:26, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

The rule is one DYK per article, sorry. Gatoclass (talk) 12:43, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Please see

unwritten rule D1. An article can be featured on DYK only once. I believe this is to avoid the same article being repeated over and over again on the main page while there are a lot of articles that haven't get a chance. Maybe we should include this in the rules as well, and not just in the unwritten ones? Chamal ^talk

12:48, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Most of the 'unwritten' rules are, at this stage, basically at the same level as the 'official' rules on the Rules and Suggestions pages. A sensible merger of the three sets into one place would probably be a good idea; I started working on one a couple of months ago but got distracted and also somewhat daunted by the sheer number of clauses, exceptions and only-semi-enforced rules. Olaf Davis | Talk 16:48, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Merge unwritten rules into the written rules. Royalbroil 04:25, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure about a merge if only because of the tremendous length (and that most of the "unwritten rules" are very rarely applicable). The two-tier system is nice as it gives new editors something manageable, but allows the old hands to have something to point to and say, "we've discussed this issue before and here was the decision we reached at the time" (which is basically what Art's list is). --JayHenry (talk) 05:51, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with Jay, I think the front end of DYK is probably daunting enough for noobs already without the "unwritten rules" collated by Art. Gatoclass (talk) 14:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

They probably should not be listed on Wikipedia:Did you know rule page to keep the page from being overrun. However, I would not object to bringing them into Did you know space and giving them the status of DYK guidelines (rather than rules), since making them rules probaly would require confirmation of consensus on each one. Also, I think we need Art's agreement before anything happens. He may prefer that they stay where they are. -- Suntag ☼ 17:23, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Although being king has been a unique experience, I agree there should be one set of rules, not 3 (in fact I was the first to put it that way). I don't think overrunning Wikipedia:Did you know is a problem because it already has 29,632 bytes, and the Unwritten Rules are only 10,768 bytes. But the way to reorganize the rules to make them less daunting for noobs is to use Wikipedia:Summary style, not to tell half the story and pretend that's all if you can't find the Unwritten Rules. For instance, "The prose portion of the article (not the entire article) must be at least 1,500 characters long (details here)." Yes, the Unwritten Rules "allows the old hands to have something to point to and say, 'we've discussed this issue before and here was the decision we reached at the time'", but that's the purpose of any rule, whether it's fivefold expansion, NPOV, or the common law. Art LaPella (talk) 18:37, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Art. Any chance we can get the DYK bot extended to merge and summarise the rules? Olaf Davis | Talk 19:54, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

That seems really sensible, Art. I agree too. Olaf did you say you'd started a draft page somewhere of the merged rules? I'd be happy to jump in and help as I've been a lazy DYKer for awhile here. --JayHenry (talk) 01:28, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

<- You and me both, JayHenry. I did start a page at User:Olaf Davis/DYK rules, but basically just dumped the then-current rules there and didn't actually get any work done on them. I'd be happy to work with you on a merge/summary project - two people makes things seem so much less daunting! Olaf Davis | Talk 10:33, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

• Note - any attempt to merge unwritten rules into the written rules is a violation of
  WP:CONSENSUS. Any said action must go through RfC or Village Pump before it can even be proposed. This is highly inappropriate behavior. Ottava Rima (talk
  ) 19:24, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

It is not true that changes must go through RfC or the Village Pump. Talk page discussion would be enough unless a) there is significant objection or b) there are not enough participants (at least watchers). This is a heavily watched page, so I doubt b will be a problem. A remains to be seen. Karanacs (talk) 20:19, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

WP:CONSENSUS - "In the case of policies and guidelines, Wikipedia expects a higher standard of participation and consensus than on other pages." Village Pump Proposals. We have these for a reason. Karanacs, I find your post above highly troubling. This is about the main page. This needs to go through the whole community first. This is not decided by a few. Ottava Rima (talk

) 21:09, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

DYK is neither a policy nor a guideline (see

Featured article criteria are often discussed solely at the various FA-related talk pages (and I believe GA does the same). Karanacs (talk

) 21:20, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Really, Karanacs? In that case, why are there so many tight regulations on what can go on the Main Page to the point that massive community consensus was needed before deciding on a new main page format? Did you forget that? DYK is one section of the Main Page. It is not distinct from the Main Page. All major Main Page changes need to go through the broad community. This is one of the core beliefs of Wikipedia. I'm rather baffled by the fact that you could honestly believe what you wrote above. Ottava Rima (talk) 21:28, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Ottava, please tone down the rhetoric. You are right, broad changes, such as to the Main page layout, do require broader community consensus. Refining the rules for what gets included (or how it is formatted) in the small spot the community has already allocated for a certain process does not usually require that level of community input. Generally, changes to processes are discussed first at the process talk page. Barring significant minority disagreement or lack of participation, it is usually not necessary to solicit further feedback (although it is not bad to do so). An appropriate analogy here would be

WP:FAC, and those criteria change from talk page discussion. Those who are interested in the discussions watchlist the page and participate when the discussions appear. Karanacs (talk

) 21:58, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Having a new set of rules being added to the current rules, effectively doubling and tightening restrictions would change the type of articles that are present on DYK, which would dramatically change the purpose of DYK from an expansive, broad area to a tighter, more elitest area. This idea has been around for a very long time and has come under fire for just as long. The reason why DYK comes up on ANI is because things happen here without going to the community first. I don't really understand why you are opposed to community consensus on an issue. Consensus is one of our fundamental aspects. Any user has any right to take such an issue up at Village Pump for a larger consensus. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:05, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Agree with Karanacs (talk · contribs). Cirt (talk) 23:06, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to agree all you want, but the policies state that consensus of a few cannot override consensus of the whole community, and if this persist, I will take it to Village Pump where it rightfully belongs, and that will result in a backlash for people not taking it there in the first place. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:25, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, if and when the rules merge is finished in user space, I'll post a note at the Pump asking for comment before moving the merged version to the DYK rules page (and obviously refrain from moving it if consensus is against it). Will that satisfy your concerns, Ottava Rima? Olaf Davis | Talk 17:14, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Hang on, I've just re-read Ottava's original post: "Any said action must go through RfC or Village Pump before it can even be proposed" (emph. added). Are you saying it's wrong to even produce a new draft copy of the rules in user space (i.e., propose a change) before going to the VP? If so I don't understand why, but if not I must have misunderstood you. Perhaps you could clarify for me - do you have any objection to the course of action described in my above post, and if so why? Olaf Davis | Talk 11 December 2008 (UTC)

A draft isn't a proposal. A proposal is stating that something is up for Consensus agreement, i.e. a large change will take place. There is Village Pump Proposals specifically for such things. Hence, it has to go there before it is a "proposal", instead of just being discussed. People were saying that this was proposed, and using the term as equivalent to it being fact/already passed. Ottava Rima (talk) 20:16, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, looks like I was just interpreting 'propose' in a less-technical sense - sorry. Will your concerns be assuaged if a post is made to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) before the draft is moved out of user space? Olaf Davis | Talk 11:44, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Gatoclass (talk · contribs), Chamal N (talk · contribs) above, etc. No repeats. Cirt (talk) 22:02, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

• I agree with no repeats. In fact, I always assumed that was the case. Repeated DKYs from the same article seem to defeat the purpose of DYK to allow broad main page access to articles not brought to community attention in other ways. —Mattisse (Talk) 23:17, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Exactly. This statement by Mattisse (talk · contribs) is spot on. Cirt (talk) 23:44, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

• Let me be the next to repeat, no repeats. -- Suntag ☼ 02:14, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

  No Repeats. Don't they collide with the notion of new articles? \ / (⁂) 06:07, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

  Agree, as per Matisse, on no repeats. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:35, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Do articles get disqualified from DYK if they are already of a substantial length before a 5x expansion? And if so, how long is too long? Thanks, Reyk _YO! 21:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't think there is a disqualifying limit per se but if you start with a 20,000 char article and take it up to 100,000 chars, you may get a few comments. It seems like an article of such a great length would be better served by the creation of new splinter articles that would qualify for DYK in their own right. Agne^Cheese/^Wine 21:34, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

There is no limit to the size of the article being expanded. However, obviously the longer the initial article, the more difficult it will be to achieve a x5 expansion. I suggest you read through the unwritten rules before embarking on a major expansion which may fall short in order to avoid possible disappointment. Gatoclass (talk) 03:56, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

How do I read the unwritten rules? Are they printed somewhere? Wronkiew (talk) 04:06, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Here:

talk/_contribs

04:15, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

The largest page I ever changed was a page that was 11k and I brought it up to 60k. No one batted an eye. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:41, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Me too roughly, about 10 -> 50k, nobody cared. YellowMonkey (bananabucket) 04:47, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Then 8k -> 40k shouldn't be a problem. Excellent. Reyk _YO! 04:48, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Slightly off-topic, but relevant: Recently we featured Alexandru Macedonski, which had been expanded from 5K to 128K (that's the expansion of the total file, not just text, but I estimated that it was a 20-fold expansion of readable text). --Orlady (talk) 18:15, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

With the new maximum file size on image uploading raised to 100 MB, I'm thinking we're gonna see some huge article size expansions. -- Suntag ☼ 02:26, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

• We should keep in mind that the point of DYK is to encourage the creation of new articles and the upgrading of stubs. I don't think the point of DKY is to encourage the enlarging of already large articles. GAN and FAC are the place to go for validation and recognition of such articles, in my view. DYK is a small little place to recognize new articles or upgraded stubs not yet eligible for GAN and FAC. —Mattisse (Talk) 04:38, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello. I just noticed that on a recent update, DYKbot used my name alongside the credits that were delivered. Here is an example, but that entire batch was using my name. Not that that's a huge drama, just I though DYKBot used the name of the Admin that moved the hooks to the Queue page? \ / (⁂) 11:28, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

DYKBot is not responsible for it. I see Gatoclass loaded the queue with your signature. --BorgQueen (talk) 11:51, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Makes sense. Thanks! \ / (⁂ | ※) 11:53, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

You prepared most of the update, so I figure you should be the one getting the credit :) Gatoclass (talk) 17:46, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The third hook in pending queue 5 refers to "that Aurora Mayor Tom Weisner" without indicating where "Aurora" is. "Illinois" needs to be added to the hook for clarification. Not only isn't Aurora, Illinois the only Aurora in the world (see Aurora#Places, but it's not even the largest Aurora in the United States. --Orlady (talk) 14:48, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Fixed by User:PFHLai. --BorgQueen (talk) 16:07, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

When adding new alts, I think that a good way to add them is with :* '''ALT1'''... that ?. Each alt needs to be approved on its own and using only a :* indentation level will allow a reasonable discussion to take place on the alt without too far of indentation. -- Suntag ☼ 19:05, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The current DYK has been up for 7 hours. The queue is empty, but there's a full set of DYKs waiting in the next update. --Orlady (talk) 01:14, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, I moved from /N to queue 1. It has all changed since I have been here last, can someone do whatever comes next? Is it automated now? Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 01:31, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

It looks like BorgQueen added the necessary template. Should be right to update now. \ / (⁂ | ※) 02:02, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Pending queue 2 starts with a hook for Miracle of the roses. I just noticed that it's not the hook that was verified (diff with the discussion). The alt hook that was verified is:
... that, in the [[hagiography|lives of saints]], the appearance of '''[[Miracle of the roses|roses]]''' ''(example pictured)'' sometimes announces the presence or activity of [[God]]?
Can someone please fix? --Orlady (talk) 05:28, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. --BorgQueen (talk) 05:33, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

As everyone can probably tell, I am maaaaad about templates, just stark raving mad, and I was just thinking...if we had a template for welcoming people who we notice starting to become active at DYK, would you guys use it? I'm thinking it would say something like "hey bro I noticed that you've been reviewing some DYK hooks lately" and then it would just say a little bit about how stuff works, and have links to useful tools (such as User:Dr pda/prosesize.js, which I couldn't live without, and the Cut & Paste character count javascript which is also pretty great) and information like Art's unwritten rules. Maybe it could even have a transclusion of some other template that keeps a list of DYK people who are currently active and available for to help and answer questions (it would be a transcluded template because then people could add or remove themselves from it as they see fit). I dunno, just thought it might be cool and a good way to attract more volunteers (plus I'm always just dying for a new excuse to goof around with a new template).

If I were to make that sometime, do any of you think you would use it?

(Or has anyone already made this?) —

Another (obviously) great idea. I always welcome brand new editors who post to DYK, but other edits, I don't. How do we know who is becoming active though? There's probably hundreds of contributors. –

talk

) 01:23, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

True.... I figured we would just kind of guess on it and go with our hunch. For example, I've been noticing

talk/contribs

01:30, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Nothing wrong with it :) But we probably need to create a list of participants at least before we can start welcoming new contributors, or they'll start thinking where the hell these people come from. Chamal ^talk 01:25, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

A list of participants sounds like a good idea; it would probably be useful for a lot more than just this, too. —

talk/_contribs

01:30, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

And, does anyone think the current version is too big or intimidating? Personally I don't find it intimidating, but I have been doing DYK for a little while now so my intuition isn't very good anymore. —

talk/_contribs

02:18, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

The template probably should be smaller than the Welcome to Wikipedia templates. Can you add one of those collapse/expand parameters to it? That way, the poster can post it collapsed if they want too. I like the photo of the cat. Not sure what it means, but it seems appropriate. -- Suntag ☼ 03:53, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Good idea, I can definitely put the bulleted list and the useful links into a {{

talk/_contribs

03:58, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know, it seems a bit patronizing to me. People who are already reviewing hooks or putting together updates are probably familiar enough already with the rules. Orlady has been around for quite a while BTW. Gatoclass (talk) 04:54, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

That's a good point...we probably don't want to welcome everyone the very first they make an edit here (that would be pretty spammy, and there are probably a lot of people who review one or two hooks and never plan on coming back), and by the time people have done it enough that we want to keep them then they might not need the information anyway. —

talk/_contribs

05:04, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

What about those who contribute hooks instead of reviewing them? How will we welcome them? Writing articles requires more effort than reviewing hooks. --J.L.W.S. The Special One (talk) 06:11, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

They get welcomed by being awarded a DYK :) Gatoclass (talk) 14:08, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Well I just took a look at {{

DYKwelcome}}, and it has a cat, so, I l-u-v it! Way to go Politizer! --Rosiestep (talk

) 23:06, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Someone came complaining that it was uncategorized...this is what they wanted me to add, right? —

talk/_contribs

23:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

I have a question regarding the 5x expansion DYK rule. Do I understand it correctly that it is the narrative portion of the article that needs to be expanded at least fivefold compared to the length of the narrative portion of the pre-expansion version of the article? Thanks, Nsk92 (talk) 19:21, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, if "narrative" is a synonym for what the rules call "prose". I couldn't find that explicitly stated in any of the rules any more, but that is the consensus. Art LaPella (talk) 19:59, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Yes, by "narrative" I did mean the "proze". Nsk92 (talk) 23:22, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's correct. The complicated way of saying it is, the part of the text that is not references/tables/bullet-lists/infoboxes/blockquotes/headers/templates/categories/links and various other stuff, has to be expanded 5x. The easier way of saying it is, what this tool counts needs to be expanded 5x.

As far as I know, prosesize.js (the tool linked above) is not declared as the "official" counter anywhere in the rules, but from what I can tell from my experience here, in discussions where a couple people get different character counts, the prosesize.js count always seems to trump the others, by convention. And since the count generated by that tool is both the count we use to measure the previous version of the article and the count we use to measure the current version, it follows that the 5x expansion must be an expansion of the characters that that tool counts. Hope this helps, —

talk/_contribs

02:38, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, Politizer, but until it is changed,

WP:CONSENSUS standards and cannot be claimed as otherwise. Ottava Rima (talk

) 02:56, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, Ottava, but you are wrong, as numerous editors have told you. We're not talking about

talk/_contribs

03:02, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but Consensus clearly states that nothing as you claim or they claim can be approved unless its by the community, and this has never happened. WP:SIZE already sets out a very clear definition and it is nothing like what you propose. Anything further from you is contradictory to SOAP, by the way, seeing as how the community guidelines are very certain that you are not correct. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:06, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The unwritten rules, which are widely regarded as describing the consensus among Did You Know contributors on fiddly points like this, provide that quotes and blockquotes are not counted towards the article character count. You should start a discussion/strawpoll/whatever if you believe consensus has changed, so that the unwritten rules can be updated accordingly. - Mark

03:16, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but that is patently incorrect. They are not widely accepted, plus DYK is hosted by the community as a whole. A handful of people cannot override it, and relying on "unwritten" rules instead of what WP:SIZE, a guideline, actually says is completely against what WP:CONSENSUS is about. Consensus has not changed because there was never a consensus discussion. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:11, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, you're the very first person I've seen who's taken issue with the measurement of article expansion, so I take that as a fairly good indicator of a lack of community outrage about the strict definition of 'prose'. Additionally, this interpretation is backed by a consideration of the purpose of allowing expanded articles onto DYK, namely that significant new content contributions be recognised. Where the content in question is not actually created by the expander, it cannot be said to be new content created by them. So in this way I agree with Agne27's statement below. - Mark 07:35, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

My emails suggest that people have taken issue on DYK before. I have over 50 DYK. However, this is a recent phenomena and change in DYK that happened this summer. You can trace it to when Art started making his "unwritten" rules, go against community consensus, and have people promote them as an actuality. No content is created by an expander or a "creator". We are editors for a reason. Please see

WP:OR. Look at my over 50 DYKs. Most of them are expansions and have a large body of "quotes" and the rest. No, its not taking Britannica wholesale, nor can you even make such a claim. For example, Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) would not have made the 5x expansion under your new definition. Hell, I'd be hard to find 10k worth of "original" text there. Yet anyone reading the page would know the scholarship, know the background, understand what the work is about, and the rest. Its called being scholarly. Not only does your reimagining of Wikipedia definitions put a bias against pages like that, it puts a bias against most science articles, or really, any article that doesn't have people put uncited, unscholarly information up. That is not what DYK is for. Ottava Rima (talk

) 16:02, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to make a, hopefully, noncontroversial suggestion that does not concern the issue of counting or not counting quotes and blockquotes towards the size of the prose portion of an article. I think it would help if in the official rules,

WP:DYK#DYK rules, where 5x expansion is discussed, it be mentioned explicitly that it is the prose portion of the article that needs to have been expanded at least fivefold. Right now the text says "articles that have been expanded fivefold or more", which is not very explicit. The meaning is probably clear to the DYK regulars but it would be helpful for newcomers, particularly the nominators, to have this point spelled out more clearly. Nsk92 (talk

) 03:28, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The next point after that talks about the length of the articles and points out that it is referring to the prose section. But if this would avoid confusion and increase clarity, I don't have a problem with it. - Mark 03:35, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Thanks for your suggestion, Nsk92. You're right, it looks like Art's rules are more explicit about where the expansion is calculated from than the official rules are. How does this rewording sound:

Former redirects, stubs, or other short articles in which the prose has been expanded fivefold or more within the last five days are also acceptable as "new" articles. Existing articles that have been expanded to only twice or three times their previous length are not eligible for DYK.

This is the same as the previous wording, except "articles that have been expanded" is replaced with "in which the prose has been expanded."

Also, on a related but different note, part of the text of the Long enough selection criteria currently reads: "The number of characters may be measured using this tool." Would anyone else be in favor of adding

talk/_contribs

03:37, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The suggested wording above looks good to me. Nsk92 (talk) 04:08, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

That's good. We'll wait and see what some of the other guys/gals have to say (it seems to be a bit quiet right now), and with any luck someone will take the initiative and make the edit to the rules page. (I can't do it myself, since I'm the one who suggested it and that would be kind of a dick move.) —

talk/_contribs

04:09, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but the Dr's assessment doesn't fly by WP:SIZE guidelines for determining it. The guidelines clearly state to click on the printable view and measure it from there. That is the Wikipedia accepted method for determining size. To change that, you must go through Village Pump Proposals. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:15, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Right. Good thing we're not trying to change the Wikipedia accepted method. —

talk/_contribs

04:17, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Last time people tried to separate DYK from Wikipedia guidelines and standard practices, the community threatened to disband DYK completely. DYK is part of Wikipedia and must abide by Wikipedia accepted definitions, guidelines, and the rest. Stop trying to override standard consensus procedures. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:30, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

WP:SIZE has nothing to do with the determination of expansion length for DYK purposes. WP:SIZE relates to the optimum length of an article on Wikipedia, nothing more. It's completely irrelevant to this discussion. Gatoclass (talk

) 04:56, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Gatoclass, that is 100% wrong. I already quoted how the WP:SIZE prose definition has the same exact features of the DYK guideline. Its that way for a reason. You cannot redefine what Prose means on Wikipedia. There is one definition. WP:SIZE relates to what counts as Prose and what counts as the encyclopedic page. It gives guidelines for when it gets too large, but it defines what counts under the size. A 5x size increase falls exactly under that. You cannot claim that it is irrelevant to this discussion because it is the community consensus agreed definition of what is prose. It is the reason why we have this wonderful tool that is used in every major size discussion: Readability tool, it checks what prose size is. If you noticed, its Dr pda's tool without users having the ability to selectively remove text in order to alter the outcomes and suit their purpose. One of the problems as of late is that these alterations in definition and going against standard Wiki consensus has led to abuses, doublestandards, and hypocrisy. It needs to stop. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:56, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) I don't think we are doing anything in deviation from Wikipedia guidelines. The whole point of DYK is to encourage new content creation and everything that is being done at DYK goes with that central purpose. The reason we narrowly define prose to exclude tables, block quotes, list, references, etc is that those items really aren't new content. Quoting a poem is different from prose text talking about the history or interpretation of the poem. The poem existed long before Wikipedia and can be found in numerous places both on the web and offline. The prose of the Wikipedia article-the new content being created-is unique Wikipedia. That is what DYK tries to encourage and that is why we hold new articles and expansion to those standards in regards to counting new content. Agne^Cheese/^Wine 04:37, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but that doesn't fly. Why? For starters, the 5x increase counts the original information within its size, which, if you discount anything not original, most pages would have a 4x increase. Furthermore, plot summaries exist and are counted. This creates a direct double standard that the rest of Wikipedia doesn't accept in any kind of fashion, nor existed in DYK before. Furthermore,

WP:OR makes it 100% known that nothing is unique to Wikipedia. These are not new ideas. These are not knew concepts. Everything must be from other, reliable sources. Thus, the spirit of DYK is against what you claim. Ottava Rima (talk

) 15:56, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Um, no offense, but that is a rather silly argument. New content is not the same as original research. Original research is an "original thought" that has not been published, etc. New content is....well, new content. A new encyclopedic article. Expanded coverage that was previously not part of the article. Everything that you and I and every other content editor does every day. Are you actually claiming that every new article you write is "original research"? Of course not. But it is still "new content" because it didn't previously exist as part of the encyclopedia of Wikipedia. Second, the consideration of the original information cuts both ways. If you start with an article that is 1000 chars and need to take it up to 5000+ for a 5x expansion, chances are, you are probably going to be creating more than 4000 chars of new content because rarely do you keep the 1000 original chars in tact. Many times 5x expansions end up being complete rewrites with little of the original content left, but yet there is the expectation that the article should be 5x expanded upon that old content that is no longer relevant. You would have probably have a more credible argument saying that standard should be re-evaluated than arguing that we should start accepting blockquotes as new content. Agne^Cheese/^Wine 18:14, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, you are completely wrong. There is a large difference between merely summarizing what something says and directly quoting it: one is informative, the other is not. Can you guess which one? Because it is obvious. By saying that blockquotes and the rest do not count as prose (which goes against the Wikipedia standard definition of it) yet positing that plot summaries do, you are encouraging a very bad, poorly informed encyclopedia and setting a standard against scholarship. Furthermore, new is defined very clearly on DYK, it means a page that was just created or just expanded. It does not say that everything on the page has to be "original", nor would Wikipedia want it. We don't put together "original" anything, so your whole claim tot he definition of new is absolutely against everything Wikipedia stands for. And it doesn't matter if you "change" any of the original characters around, its not new. Furthermore, the fact that you would propose such a close examination is troubling and sets up a double standard that goes against what DYK is about. We have always accepted block quotes, quotes, and all other classically defined prose as prose until just recently, and that was only a handful of people doing such. My argument is not that the standard needs to be changed. My argument is that people are trying to change the standard in defiance of what is common practice on Wikipedia and against the tradition, which is ethically very wrong and improper. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:30, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Ottava, you think everything is "troubling" unless you're the one who's doing it. For the last time, if you think people at DYK are so evil, go take us to VP or RfC and see what happens. Quit throwing around empty threats that you never go through with and do nothing but waste everyone's time. —

talk/_contribs

18:34, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, because support for an item that just came out a few months ago, made without getting community consensus, and radically redefining tradition Wikipedia definitions is not troubling how? Wow. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:43, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

• For the last couple of years the size rule has seemed to work well with no contentious demands for change or contesting of rules that I recall. DKY used to be largely free of the tenacious splitting of hairs. The only problems then seemed to be that overworked DYK editors occasionally became overwhelmed. There was an atmosphere that "many" should be given a chance for a DYK. I wonder if we could go back to those informal days, or is it too late? (I have been feeling rather intimidated lately from entering the fray by submitting a hook! Or am I overreacting to the current atmosphere?) —Mattisse (Talk) 04:53, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

It seems to be a recent phenomena. I can count DYK from just a few weeks ago in which there was no problem or challenge like this. I think it is from the development of a second set of rules that aren't rules but are being enforced as if they are. Such a thing adds to much complication, control, and is being used by a small group of individuals. As you notice, there is a correspondence of admin who have been around for a very long time no longer showing up. Which came first? Who knows. But there is a clear change. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:03, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

As an example, I have expanded an article 5x through the addition of a table, before (which is obviously not counted towards prose). On the other hand, I might have expanded prose size 5x, not character size, and through the addition of the table just did both. But, if there is a legitimate increase in the amount of information provided by the article, whether through tables or through a quote, why is it discounted? JonCatalán^(Talk) 18:59, 13 December 2008 (UTC)