Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-02/Dispatches

The Wikipedia Signpost

Dispatches: Did You Know

By Royalbroil, April 28 2008

Did You Know ... (DYK) is the Main Page section that showcases the best new or expanded articles from the previous five days. It features hooks—short, catchy phrases—taken these articles. An interesting hook is likely to draw in a variety of readers; shorter hooks are preferred, so long as they don't misrepresent the article content. The DYK section is a way to thank editors who create new content, and to encourage other editors to contribute to and improve that article and the encyclopedia. DYK entries appear on the Main Page for at least six hours, with up to four updates per day; approximately 800 articles appeared in the last 30 days (more than 25 a day).

Rules

Under DYK rules, there are two ways that an article can be considered new: within the last five days, the article was newly created and has more than approximately 1500 characters of main body text, or a stub was expanded at least five fold. Main body text doesn't count references, lists, infoboxes, etc. Articles that are content forks of existing articles are not eligible. While articles chosen for DYK are not expected to strictly adhere to the Manual of Style, nominations are expected to meet notability standards, be written in a neutral point of view, and have no maintenance needed tags, such as cleanup, unreferenced/poorly referenced or wikification.

How to suggest an article

Nominations can be suggested at the DYK suggestion area. The suggestion area is divided by nomination date, which refer to either the date that the article was created or the date that the article began its five-fold expansion. The nominator writes a short, catchy hook of less than 200 characters that presents an unusual or interesting question that starts with the words "Did You Know" ... For example, this April Fool's Day, we featured the hook:

• ...that in a few villages and towns of southern France and Spain it is illegal to die, and that there are attempts to have the same law in a town in Brazil?

Trusted contributors review the list of suggestions to make sure that they meet all of the rules and that the hook has been cited by an inline citation. These contributors leave comments on articles that have issues, so it is important to watch for these comments on your suggestions. At around the fifth day<! -- fifth day what? after nomination? after creation ? -->, five to eight articles that meet the criteria are removed from the suggestion list and are temporarily moved to a staging area. Administrators update the main page from this staging area approximately every six hours. The administrators place a message on the article's talk page noting that it was featured on the main page and they also credit nominators and major contributors to the article.

History

DYK made its first Main Page appearance on February 22, 2004. The article, pencil sharpener, was developed by Raul654 who had been an editor with Wikipedia for about six months at that time and is now a bureaucrat and the Featured article director. Recognition for article creators started on November 24, 2004,^[1] DYK began placing DYK notifications on article talk pages on January 13 2006,^[2] and nominators started receiving credit on May 13, 2006.^[3]