Wikipedia talk:Did you know: Difference between revisions

Did you know?
Did you know?
Introduction and rules
Introduction	WP:DYK
General discussion	WT:DYK
Guidelines	WP:DYKCRIT
Reviewer instructions	WP:DYKRI
Nominations
Nominate an article	WP:DYKCNN
Awaiting approval	WP:DYKN
Approved	WP:DYKNA
April 1 hooks	WP:DYKAPRIL
Holding area	WP:SOHA
Preparation
Preps and queues	T:DYK/Q
Prepper instructions	WP:DYKPBI
Admin instructions	WP:DYKAI
Main Page errors	WP:ERRORS
History
Statistics	WP:DYKSTATS
Archived sets	WP:DYKA
Just for fun
Monthly wraps	WP:DYKW
Awards	WP:DYKAWARDS
Userboxes	WP:DYKUBX
Hall of Fame	WP:DYK/HoF
List of users ...
... by nominations	WP:DYKNC
... by promotions	WP:DYKPC
Administrative
Scripts and bots	WP:DYKSB
On the Main Page	T:DYK
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To ping the DYK admins	{{DYK admins}}
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This is where the Did you know section on the main page, its policies and the featured items can be discussed.

List of DYK participants at WP:DYK

I was noticing that the current List of DYK admin participants seems a little dated...it doesn't mention some of the admins I see doing a lot of work around here, for example. Also, I was thinking, would it also be useful to list non-admins who participate a lot at DYK (especially in vetting nominations)? I often find myself, when talking to people at their talk pages about DYK, saying something like "that's not something I'm 100% sure about, but other people you might want to ask are...." and then listing about 8 names...so maybe it would be useful to have a centralized list (preferably a subsection of what I linked above...the section name could be List of DYK participants and then it could be divided into active admin participants, non-active admin participants, and non-admin participants); that way we could just point people to that list. (Of course, people can also find out who's active just by glancing at T:TDYK...I know when I was just getting started, I exchanged a lot of messages with RyanCross because he's the one who had reviewed my first couple noms so he's who I was familiar with.) My impression is that the admin lists are useful for if an update is late or there's other urgent stuff that needs to be done and can only be done by an admin; having a non-admin list might also be useful, though, if anyone not familiar with DYK has questions about how it works, seeing as how most of the reviewing and vetting seems to be done by the non-admins (at least, that has been the trend recently). Does anyone think this would be useful? Does anyone want (or not want) their name to be included? —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:39, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think that having a list of non-admins could be very useful, and I would have no objections to having my name listed there I've been active moving hooks over to the next update queue sense early March, and I know that it could be useful to people who need to get the opinions of the "DYK regulars" before proposing any major changes or for anyone who wants to get a message out to those who are involved in DYK. --Mifter (talk) 00:54, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I made a makeshift list at User:Politizer/DYK non-admin participants, where we can try to get stuff organized until it's time to put the list at WP:DYK (if we decide it's worthwhile to put it there). I also added a second list of people who contribute a lot of nominations to DYK. Anyway, I've put some people's names on without asking...so if you don't want your name on the list and you are \ /, Orlady, RyanCross, Suntag, Cbl62, Alansohn, or TonyTheTiger, then make sure to go there and take it off! (I will also notify people on the list before putting it up for real, since some of those guys don't check this page often). —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 01:36, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't they just refreshed and updated the status of the list a few months back by contacting every admin? - Mailer Diablo 18:16, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, they may have...that was probably before I was wiki-born. I was just noticing that some people I see a lot, like Gatoclass and BorgQueen, weren't on the list last time I looked...and there's no mention of non-admins who help out (many of whom do more work here than the admins listed—not that that's a good or bad thing, it's just how people choose to spend their time, and the non-admins who do a lot of vetting might know as much or more about the process than the admins who are just active on occasion). —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:27, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The list is rather voluntary (more like how Wikiproject memberships work). Of course if you need assistance/response/etc and you know the regulars... :) - Mailer Diablo 20:02, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For the record the refresh Mailer Diablo is talking about was a little over two months ago - see my edit here. At that time Gato was taking a short break from DYK which is why he didn't end up on the list; I'm not sure about Borg. The admin list used to serve the purpose of giving people access to sysops to go running to when the update was late, but the bot has removed that necessity now. So yes, if we have a list it would seem to make more sense to have it be of regulars who understand the DYK system and precedents rather than limiting it to those with the bit. Olaf Davis | Talk 23:22, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Olaf's point will be particularly relevant when the list is made official (which I support; it's a logical thing to have in the {{DYKbox}} template). It will help new or infrequent nominators to see immediately who is likely to be "around" and able to offer advice, help etc. For my part, I'm on DYK and its associated pages every day (and at various times of day): even if I make no edits, I'm still observing and reading. I'm sure this applies to many other users. Such users would be ideal candidates to "feature" in the list (if they wish to, of course!). Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 23:44, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Poll

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposals. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of these proposals is that the first three proposals were defeated. The fourth proposal on the unwritten rules was resolved as "keep".

I would've thought that by closing the discussion we could actually start to make progress. But it seems that once again it has resolved to threats and aggression. This has gone too far, DYK has been late updating twice this week. Therefore, I'm hoping this poll will demonstrate the consensus here and allow for some headway. Ottava, if the consensus here is against you, then there will be little point continuing discussion here. Remember, this isn't a vote for policy, I'm just trying to get some level of salvageable debate from the stuff above. \ / (⁂ | ※) 21:19, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ottava's Proposal

(copied from previous discussion) Proposed: For DYK to base its 5x expansion off of approximate page byte size. Also, allowing administrator discretion under IAR to allow pages falling short (based on images, referencing, tables, and other wikimark ups in the pre-expanded version) to be accepted as long as they are over approximately 4.5x the original size. Wording: 5x expansion is defined as an approximate page byte increase of 5x. Pages expanded approximately 4.5x or more but fall short because of wikiformatting (images, referencing, tables, markups, see also, list, and other formatting items) are acceptable under reviewer discretion and IAR as long as there is a significant expansion to the page. Reason: This would return to the original spirit of the DYK and allow for more inclusion within topics. It would also remove arguments resulting from various challenges to page size and promote the creation and expansion of articles instead of chasing away valuable contributors. DYK is to encourage the beginning of work on Wikipedia and to attract people to such pages to help out. The above wording, although prescriptive, would ensure that this continues.

Support

Support as proposer. Ottava Rima (talk) 22:07, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support; although I admit that, given that I am not an administrator, my experience with "did you know" (in regards to updating it and whatnot), I believe that having a set of "written rules" is important to maintain some sense of consistency. There is a lot of inconsistency in DYK currently, despite the magnificent work put into it by many editors. I, personally, don't see any problems with specifying rules and whatnot, even if the above are already "unwritten rules". JonCatalán^(Talk) 05:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, we do have a well established and consistent rules base at this point, I think if you had a deeper engagement with DYK you would recognize that, but I know for the more casual contributor it can all seem a bit bewildering. The proof of that is that we have very few disputes, and those we do have are generally resolved quickly. It's probably true that some of our info pages could do with a rewrite, and as with any area of the wiki there are always some new grey areas being discovered and dealt with, but that is not the same as saying the current ruleset as it exists is inadequate.

As for Ottava's proposals above however, it would actually severely penalize article expanders to base their x5 expansion on bytecount, because there are a great many articles with only a sentence or two of main body text that are thousands of bytes long because of infoboxes, refs, external links and so on, we would lose a huge number of submissions if we went on bytecount. Moving from x5 expansion to some sort of vaguely defined 4.5 expansion would also just confuse the issue. O.'s proposals above are anything but an improvement on the current system. Gatoclass (talk) 12:00, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Didn't read the last clause? That exception would allow for any problems to be overcome. No page will have over 2k worth of formatting. Furthermore, if it did, then it could have easily been removed by others as being improper before it would have ever came to being expanded. The 4.5x is a hard leeway because admin like you don't give an actual leeway. Its only on mood. This would give assurance that IAR is actually respected. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oh yeah, because having an extra "exception" and a situation where people are saying "did you read the last clause" doesn't sound at all like the instruction creep that you claim to be fighting. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:12, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
"all like the instruction creep that you claim to be fighting" Really? So adding an additional sentence to negate a whole page of secondary rules is not fighting instruction creep? Simple mathematics say that adding one to remove dozens is a removal, not an addition. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
...except that your claim that your scarcely comprehensible proposal would "negate a whole page of secondary rules" is a fantasy. Gatoclass (talk) 12:48, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Really? Because if it wouldn't, why are you opposing them so heavily? And why is the opposition relying on the unwritten rules to say most of the things which are to be contradicted in the passage of the above? Ottava Rima (talk) 16:34, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

Oppose so as not to encourage wikilaywering. I believe making this rule explicit is unnecessary, for reasons I gave here. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 21:38, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - This specification is unnecessary. Administrators are already free to use discretion -- and actually might use even more discretion than this proposal calls for. --Orlady (talk) 22:22, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - although I'd support some general disclaimers: that reviewer discretion and IAR always apply, that experienced nominators should make a bit of extra effort to follow the guidelines and remember it's no big deal if not all your articles get picked. I have 50 odd DYKs now and I know the rules, so there's no reasons to make an exception for me if I write something that doesn't quite qualify. Save the exceptions for encouraging new editors, and not old hands like me. --JayHenry (talk) 22:32, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - No need as process works as is. Encourages instruction creep. Gives more to argue about. See FAC talk and it's many archives of discussion over what is a "short" article among many other endless discussions there, as well as FA criteria talk. All with endless polls, no consensus, signifying nothing. I'm opposed to going down this road. —Mattisse (Talk) 22:59, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose No evidence of a problem with the current process or that this proposal solves it. I do support flexibility for new DYKers, but that is a separate issue from the 5x expansion. I just expanded an article for Robert Shapiro (film producer) that included 34 characters of prose, but hundreds of characters in a list of films he produced, which would have made a 5x expansion far more challenging. Article expansion should be about adding prose, not infoboxes, tables, block quotes or ancillary content. Alansohn (talk) 01:55, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose I see nothing wrong with the current system. D.B.^{talk•contribs} 02:43, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 02:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - current rules work well and are the result of long experience and established consensus. Gatoclass (talk) 03:19, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose --BorgQueen (talk) 03:22, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Articles should be based on prose. Wizardman 03:36, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. The way to "avoid arguments" is simple, clearly expressed rules, not to add a layer of complexity by having separate rules only for the 4.5x-5x range. Art LaPella (talk) 04:35, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Overly complex "solution" to a non-existent problem. BuddingJournalist 06:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Way too complex. As an aside, I would prefer that rather than this "5x" approach, we accept alter the definition of "new" to include any article which was a very minimal stub or redirect previously; e.g. if it was 100 characters or less, and grows to 1500 characters, and the hook comes from the new text rather than the original 100 characters, it should be acceptable. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 16:56, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Most of the reasons above explain my train of thought on this. \ / (⁂ | ※) 04:12, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose as expansion should be based on an increase in readable text, not formatting and infobox structure. Changing from prose to total byte count could require up to a 20x text expansion to get to 4.5x in bytes for stub articles with existing infoboxes. - Dravecky (talk) 21:09, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

SIZE

For DYK purposes, the prose size, when counted, includes block quotes. Note: Dr pda's tool does not count block quotes as prose, however Dr pda's opinion can be read in detail here

Note however, that Dr. pda is neither an expert in FAC criteria nor in DYK criteria. In any event, FAC criteria do not equal DYK criteria. He is merely describing his tool. —Mattisse (Talk) 00:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support

Support Both WP:SIZE and Dr Pda states that Prose includes quotes and blockquotes. Also, Readability checker already includes them. "New" does not mean unique. New means a created page or a page experiencing 5x expansion, no more, no less. Ottava Rima (talk) 22:07, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
See: Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) evaluated by Dr. Pda Note that the blockquotes are not counted by Dr. Pda. —Mattisse (Talk) 22:49, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note: 'WP:SIZE does not "state" blockquotes are included in Prose. It makes no statement specific to blockquotes. WP:SIZE addresses downloading problems and is not a "tool". From WP:SIZE: "Specifically, for stylistic purposes, readable prose excludes: External links, Further reading, References, Footnotes, See also, and similar sections; Table of contents, tables, list-like sections, and similar content; and markup, interwiki links, URLs and similar formatting. To quickly estimate readable prose size, click on the printable version of the page, select all, copy, paste into an edit window, delete remaining items not counted in readable prose, and hit preview to see the page size warning." —Mattisse (Talk) 23:15, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As pointed out above and below, Dr Pda says that they should be counted and that his device cannot. The Readability counter does count them. That is why the Readability counter is more accurate. The mere fact that Mattisse would try to say what is contrary to what is actually written on Dr Pda's page, saying that quotes are included as prose, is troubling: (This method is not perfect however and may include text which isn't prose (eg in navboxes), or exclude text which is (eg in Cquote, or prose written in bullet-point form,") cquotes are a clear form of blockquoting and are just one of many types of blockquoting. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:18, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Dr Pda writes scripts; he is not an authority on DYK or FAC. Remember WP:CONSENSUS? Where was Dr Pda given authority to decide whether blockquotes are to be counted in DYK? &—Mattisse (Talk) 16:30, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As I recall consensus from past discussions was to not count block quotes, but I don't think it's a big deal. ~~If the pda tool counts them and some editors use the tool, then whatever.~~ We can revisit if people start padding articles out with blockquotes and it becomes ridiculous, but I don't see that happening. I think it's pretty trivial either way, and have no objection to whatever is decided. --JayHenry (talk) 22:32, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support - If both the guidelines and PDA tool include block quotes, I don't see why we should go changing it. Generally, people aren't primarily using block quotes to make their articles bigger, usually they would just be used to go into greater detail, instead of trying to summarise it into one sentence. Sunderland06 (talk) 22:41, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
PDA tool doesn't include block quotes. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 22:50, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It does clearly state that it is intended to include it but cannot through formatting problems: ""This method is not perfect however and may include text which isn't prose (eg in navboxes), or exclude text which is (eg in Cquote, or prose written in bullet-point form,". So don't try to confuse people. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not "trying to confuse people." Sunderland said s/he votes Support "if ... the PDA tool include[s] block quotes," and I was clarifying that he doesn't. Neither of us said anything about whether or not it's intended to include them. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 23:18, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And it clearly says to count them manually on the instruction sheet. How can you claim otherwise? Its written right there for everyone to see. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:20, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
User talk:Dr pda/prosesize.js doesn't say that anywhere. Please remember that this is meant to be a poll, not a new argument. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 23:26, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This is apples and oranges. There have been no complaints from FAC that blockquotes are excluded. Others have requested scripts that do specifically exclude blockquotes.[1] An article with too many quotes would not be eligible as FAC for stylistic reasons, but in any event, would not significantly alter the size of a normal FAC. (The FAC "short article" question is still under discussion, and the blockquote issue comes up there if the size of the article is inflated by including them.) In any event, an article consisting almost entirely of blockquotes would not fulfill the DYK criteria of original prose. The goals of DYK are much different than of FAC. —Mattisse (Talk) 23:51, 14 December 2008 (UTC) [reply]

If this is meant to be a poll, why do you keep responding to everyone who doesn't support your view? Saying "exclude text which is " is clear that he means that the quoting is prose and saying "The text counted as prose is highlighted in yellow, so it is easy to see whether the prose size is over or underestimated." means that you should be looking to count in and count out the prose according to the previous sentence. You can't misconstrue his words in the way you want. Ottava Rima (talk) 23:51, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Dr Pda writes scripts; he is not an authority on DYK or FAC. Remember WP:CONSENSUS? Where's his? —Mattisse (Talk) 02:07, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Um, dude, this is the only vote I've responded to, and only to clear up a misunderstanding, as explained at \ /'s talk page. And if responding to people who don't support your view is so wrong, what do you have to say about this? Hm? Oops. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 23:57, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
and Opps, [2] —Mattisse (Talk) 02:01, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support, but on the other hand don't get too silly. Allow one blockquote at the most per DYK_MIN kilobytes/words. Sceptre ^(talk) 23:46, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I understand the opposition, but I can also understand the use of these. So long as one quote isn't half the article then they're fine. Wizardman 03:25, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support - As long as its not a overly long quote it will be fine so this has my support. Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page | Contribs)} 04:23, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support, the same metrics should be used for all evaluations of an article (per the KISS principle), otherwise DYK is giving preference to articles that are written with its rules in mind. I didnt submit Fâ’iz El-Ghusein because the rules around here are too complex, and I dont submit enough to have them wrote learnt, so I give up most of the time. I've created around 300 articles, of which 100 could probably have been DYKs if I could easily figure out the rules, and run them through an automated check to determine when I have met the criteria. A few days ago I tried to install the protosize javascript, and it didnt work for me in the modern skin. Please, can we use the readability tool; it just works - if it needs a better parser, I'll be happy to help with the coding. If a new article is overburdened with quotes, fix that problem via other means, such as commenting on the DYK submission to suggest that the quotes need to be trimmed. Dont reject new articles that have good quotes which a reader will be interested to read, as it is often more appropriate to give the reader quotations from notable sources. This is "Did you know", not "Look at my writing skills". John Vandenberg ^(chat) 16:49, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry prosesize.js doesn't work for you, but it's the ideal tool for determining new content at DYK and we can't change the rules just for the convenience of one user. The readability tool is opaque and gives no breakdown of what it has actually counted. But if you're really worried an article of yours might be a little short, you can always ask someone to do a check for you before nominating it. Gatoclass (talk) 01:45, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually (this is just a clarification) we do often help fix articles with too many quotes, rather than rejecting them. For example, Daniel Mangeas is an article that had too many quotes to pass DYK and I took a moment to clean it up and summarize and integrate the quoted content into the article. (I'm only using that example because it's one of the first DYK tasks I ever did so it's easy to remember; there are other good examples as well.) To be honest, though, DYK reviewers' time is limited, and how much effort they're willing to spend helping a contributor get their hook up to a passable level is directly correlated with how polite and civil that user has been with DYK people in the past; the reason I didn't help Ottava clean up his other article that didn't pass because of quotes (the one that started this whole argument) is because Ottava had already attacked 3 DYK editors by then and had shat all over anyone who criticized any of his articles. There's no reason to help someone who treats other editors like that. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:45, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The mere fact that you would try and act like quotes or blockquotes are not an important part of an article shows that you are out of touch with article writing on Wikipedia. Try going through the FA process because your lack of understanding is detrimental. Quotes don't need to be "fixed". They are an essential scholarly aspect, and all you are doing is dumbing down this encyclopedia and positing rubbish instead of quality. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:02, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Never said all quotes need to be "fixed;" just said some articles have too many. Before you try telling me that my editing is rubbish, maybe you should take a look at what I'm actually talking about. This is an example of too many unnecessary block quotes. I never said that blockquotes aren't important; I just said that when there are too many they need to be cleaned up. But thanks for telling me my editing is rubbish; that's really what this poll was supposed to be about. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:08, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Really? Because its hard to mistake what you mean when you say: "summarize and integrate the quoted content into the article". That means to get rid of them. Furthermore, the only thing "unnecessary" about those quotes is that they blockquote things that should be standard quote. They don't need to be "integrated". They don't need to be "fixed". And if you honestly think blockquotes are important then why don't you support them being included in the prose? You really know how to say two completely different things. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:19, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like we have different writing styles. Ta-da! Let's go bake cookies. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:54, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And only one of is us part of a campaign to make sure that the other's isn't allowed on DYK even though its been there for a very long time now. Ottava Rima (talk) 19:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Heeeeey.... that doesn't sound like cookie-baking to me! —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 19:40, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

I notice that most users who have voted for this proposal have qualified it by saying "as long it's not an overly long quote". But who decides what an "overly long quote" is? We have a clear rule right now that is easy to follow, changing this rule is just going to make it harder for already overworked DYK contributors to do their job, as well as opening the door to more disputes.

Apart from which, this wikiproject has already been attacked many times over its low threshold for DYK awards (only 1,500 characters of new content) and now people are arguing for even less original content? That just makes no sense at all. I hope some of the people who have voted in support of this proposal will reconsider. Gatoclass (talk) 05:24, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If admin are so stressed having to not count blockquotes, then they can easily just use the readability counter which counts them all so they wont have to go through piecemeal and determine what is in or out. Dr Pda already declares that certain things are added that don't belong. Readability only includes what does belong according to Size. Sure seems like the adoption of this would make every admin's life easier - they only have to do one simple click instead of working the math themselves. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What "readability counter"? Are you referring to the page size field in the history page? That is only a bytecount, and as you can see, your bytecount proposal is going down in flames. Gatoclass (talk) 05:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Readability tool. This device has been used in many, many places to determine page size. In particular, it was very helpful during FAC. And I don't care if it "goes down in flames". People deserve the option regardless if it is popular or not. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:11, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Question about Readability tool. What does it mean when it distinguishes Text from Proses as in this?Readability: Major depressive disorder —Mattisse (Talk) 19:35, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are text that aren't part of the prose. The previous parsing use to have the three put side by side, but I guess that feature was recently dropped? Regardless, Jayvdb offered to put together a device that would measure pages automatically and compare them, so he could probably cater something that would allow for the various features that have changed over time to come back. If he knows how, that is. There are a lot of crafty people over at toolserver. Ottava Rima (talk) 20:14, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

LOL, your own recommended page size counter itself recommends the use of Dr pda's text counter to determine the amount of readable prose! Gatoclass (talk) 15:56, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

And Dr Pda's states that blockquotes are part of prose. Yet you don't seem to care about that. Selective reading? Run the device sometime and you will see how it breaks down the text. 15:59, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Dr Pda writes scripts; he is not an authority on what to include in DYK or FAC. Remember WP:CONSENSUS? Where was Dr Pda given authority to decide whether blockquotes (or anything else) are to be counted in DYK? —Mattisse (Talk) 16:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Precisely. As I've tried to explain to Ottava numerous times, we are counting the amount of new content here, not the amount of prose per se. Prosesize.js just happens to be a very convenient tool for us because it excludes blockquotes, which are not original content. Unfortunately, he doesn't appear to pay much attention to explanations, because he keeps on making the same redundant arguments. Gatoclass (talk) 16:52, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FTW! —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:59, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

arbitrary section break

Lets look through some of my expansions and see how vital quotes and blockquotes are to having an encyclopedic page, which is new because it didn't exist there nor in that form before, not "new" because all text is new (which was the movement of new to a definition completely not there). Here are just five examples:

1. Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) - Every paragraph has a quote. The background section needs those quotes because they are entries in diaries and journals. You can't just say the information, nor would that be appropriate. Even WP:OR would be against interpreting it. Quoting Shelley on why he chose the myth is also extremely vital and cannot just be summarized if you want to understand the piece. Then quoting the lines with their critical interpretation is important so that people can understand what is happening in the poem. You cannot just summarize the events. Then Shelley has two blockquotes where he discusses what his character means. These cannot just be summarized. To do otherwise would be to be completely unscholarly.

2. Mont Blanc (poem) - from 3k to 18k, should be no problem. However, lots of quoting would reduce the body of the text considerably and make a guarenteed page have almost no "text" according to new definitions.

3. The Lucy poems - Same as Mont Blanc. This should have no problem, but without quotes and blockquotes, there is little text to say is prose and it would be close.

4. Samuel Richardson - 5x expansion almost exactly, but quotes his writing on himself to flush out various details, so falls short by a lot. Still 100% scholarly and encyclopedic, but those evil quotes and blockquotes guarantee that DYK doesn't care.

5. Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets - The quotes and the duplication of a line or two from the biography would ensure that this was not 5x.

These five articles wouldn't be allowed on DYK if quotes and blockquotes did not count. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:36, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just checked all five of those articles with prosesize.js and here are the results:

Prometheus Unbound: 4562 chars -> 28kb = 6.1 expansion
Mont Blanc: 2558 chars -> 18kb = x7 expansion
Lucy poems: 15kb -> 35kb = only a 2.3 expansion using prosesize. But using a bytecount it still wouldn't be anywhere near eligible. Looks like someone made a mistake with this one. Gatoclass (talk) 16:37, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Samuel Richardson: 4786 -> 24kb = 5.01 expansion.
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: 276 chars -> 3583 chars = x13 expansion.

So you are completely wrong to think these articles would be ineligible using prosesize. Just as I suspected, you've been wasting everyone's time here for days on end with claims that all your articles would be ineligible using prosesize.js without even bothering to check your facts first. Gatoclass (talk) 16:37, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Gato, my manual removal of anything without quotes comes up with different numbers than what you have listed. Remember, people said anything in quotes must be removed. That includes the poem section. Mont Blanc shows up as 8,000 characters once all of the quotes and poem passages are removed.

Also, Gato, you are basing it off the wrong item for Lucy. That was developed in the user space and then the history was merged. If you want, I can prove how your math above is wrong compared to the standard that you put up, but just Mont Blanc is enough to show that you are very wrong here. You weren't even capable of calculating the size based on your own standard. That shows that your standard is wrong. Ottava Rima (talk) 17:17, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just checked, Lives comes out at 2,700 characters according to the standards claimed by Gato before. That is quite different than what Gato claims as the character amount above. That is before you discount the section pulled from Johnson's biography, which reduces it by another 1,000 characters. 276 x 5 = 1,380. The page would only be about 1,500, so it would just barely make it. Clearly, there is a huge difference between the current page and the previous edition, so it verifies that this barely 5x is more than just what a 5x is. Ottava Rima (talk) 17:22, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I can't see any block quotes in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets at all. Disregarding the list of poets, this still counts at around 4000 characters, using both MSWord, Dr pda and this. \ / (⁂ | ※) 00:24, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Backslash - the conversation uses blockquotes as the biggest of the "non-new" prose. The quotes are also considered in this. As per claimed by others, neither quotes nor blockquotes would count as prose. If blockquotes are then accepted as prose, so too would be quotes. You have to remove all quoted information. Also, under "non-new", the information int he background section that was duplicated from the Samuel Johnson page at the time would also not count towards a 5x expansion. Ottava Rima (talk) 00:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Forgive me if I sound confused, but judging by all the previous comments, both in the support and oppose section, everyone is referring to just block quotes. \ / (⁂ | ※) 00:57, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's generally only blockquotes which are not counted as new content, because in-text quotations tend to be short and not worth the trouble of excluding. We're not going to fuss over a few bytes here and there. In the case of an article that has a lot of in-text quotes however, the article is still likely to be rejected if it depends on those quotes to meet the length criteria. We are permitted to exercise a little common sense when the situation requires it. Gatoclass (talk) 02:19, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A simple search on this page says otherwise. 1. Agne on 04:37, 13 December 2008 points out quoting, such as in poetry, is not "new". 2. The whole "new content" discussion has declared that quotes, blockquotes, and the rest are not "new". This is right above. Now Gato, if you want to declare that quotes and the rest, besides blockquotes, are "new" information and do count, please do. That would restore Samson Agonistes back to the 5x expansion and make the removal of it completely improper. Ottava Rima (talk) 16:39, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The unwritten rule in question refers to blockquotes, nothing more. But that does not mean we cannot exercise discretion when quotes are used excessively albeit in a different format. Gatoclass (talk) 04:17, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Forgive me, but I must but in. Your hook which had Samson Agonistes wasn't removed entirely. It was a double hook that just got featured on the Main Page without Samson bolded. While I can appreciate the need to have proper recognition for your work, did having it just as normal text make that much of a difference? \ / (⁂ | ※) 23:28, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It wasn't about it being my work. It was about it being a display piece for Milton's 400th birthday. The objection to Samson had it delayed so it did not get displayed on Milton's birthday. Only half of his birthday had DYK running on him, although it was originally determined that there would be Milton on the mainpage during the whole time. Thats what the original IAR was about. An important 400th birthday comes only once in a while. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:50, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You have only yourself to blame for that. If you had tried to work with DYK reviewers instead of getting up in everyone's face, maybe people would have taken more effort to get your hooks up. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 04:16, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Seeing as how you constantly use things like "boo hoo" as edit summaries only undermines your claims that you are not responsible for what happened. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:13, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am "responsible for" a) pointing out that the expansion did not meet the requirements in the guidelines that were being used at the time; and b) that one of the other articles relied entirely upon a single source. These are things that are done for any articles; the fact that you had a prior "agreement" to have these articles on DYK doesn't exempt you from meeting the guidelines that everyone has to meet. And you are the only person "responsible" for having written an article that used only one source and had no wikilinks. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 19:12, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

According to Art's page, single source falls under ""Rules" sometimes invoked but lacking a consensus". So, your pursuit of it seems to be rather inappropriate. Your continued review of my DYK after already involved in a conflict was also off. Ottava Rima (talk) 19:39, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How is this back and forth helpful? Both of you know better. Please move back to trying to find consensus going forward instead of sparring over the past. ++Lar: t/c 19:42, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

Oppose for reasons stated by other editors above, about generation of new content. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 21:38, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Weak oppose - As a general rule, the use of block quotes to expand articles should be discouraged. Some contributors have a propensity for quoting sources instead of distilling the information into new text, and DYK should not encourage that practice. Furthermore, when used as intended, block quotes often are essentially illustrations (or even decoration) for an article, which generally should not count. However, because block-quoted text sometimes adds meaningful content to an article, I don't feel strongly about this -- this is an area for some common-sense discretion. --Orlady (talk) 22:22, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - Dr. Pda does not count block quotes. See: Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) evaluated by Dr. Pda Note that the blockquotes are not counted by Dr. Pda. —Mattisse (Talk) 22:46, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This is 100% wrong according to Dr Pda's instructions saying: "This method is not perfect however and may include text which isn't prose (eg in navboxes), or exclude text which is (eg in cquote, or prose written in bullet-point form," (emphasis added) Ottava Rima (talk) 23:25, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
But, Ottava Rima! You have done an about face. Dr Pda's tool is the one you dissed hours ago as a nothing tool not used by FAC. (See the second of your three posts here! That is 100% patently wrong. Dr Pda's tool is not "accepted" at FAC. It is not a tool at all to measure anything. The readability tool takes the script and does it automatically so it cannot be altered in any way. That is the only accurate measure. And WP:SIZE was ment to discuss all size issues. You cannot selectively change that. Ottava Rima (talk) 02:52, 14 December 2008 (UTC) Please, stick to one version of your "facts" as this is getting quite confusing! 'You seem to be selectively changing your "facts". —Mattisse (Talk) 00:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Dr Pda's tool is the one you dissed hours ago as a nothing tool not used by FAC." and I still don't believe its better than Readability, which is the correct one. As I pointed out, even Dr Pda states that it isn't complete and has problems. Readability does not. You supported Dr Pda, and I proved why Dr Pda doesn't support you. There is no "two versions". There is you being wrong on both counts. There is a major difference. Ottava Rima (talk) 00:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am tired of you always calling me "wrong". I am merely pointing things out. I support Dr Pda as a useful tool at FAC, which I frequent. The readability tool is ignored at FAC, even though it is put on the FAC page, I cannot remember the last time any one used it, other than to question what grade level an FAC should be aiming to write for. I though you complained about that it was "wrong" to call people "wrong". Yet you are always calling me "wrong". I am merely pointing out the major inconsistencies in your statements. Dr Pda writes scripts. He doesn't "support" anyone. You are quoting him as some kind of authority! Well, I am giving up trying to make sense of anything you are saying. Hope you get your way here so all this can end. —Mattisse (Talk) 01:46, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose per Orlady etc. Johnbod (talk) 01:39, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose we should be encouraging editors to write articles, not to be cutting-and-pasting content. I have no objection to these blockquotes being in articles, but it's very easy to see how we can end up with blockquote-heavy articles lacking in meaningful prose on the subject at hand. Alansohn (talk) 01:58, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose per Alansohn D.B.^{talk•contribs} 02:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose DYK is about new content. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 02:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose BorgQueen (talk) 03:24, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Strong oppose - per Alansohn. This would open the door to gaming of the system, and potentially force us to start disqualifying articles based on lack of meaningful content, which would only lead to more disputes. The current system works very well. Gatoclass (talk) 03:36, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Tons of blockquotes were introduced before. This didn't become a problem until recently, and that was when people suddenly decided that blockquotes no longer counted. You already went about disqualifying articles with meaningful content, so you don't have to claim that there are any actual fears like that. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:39, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nonsense, I have been vetting submissions on this project for more than twelve months and can't recall a time when blockquotes were ever counted. Articles which have previously been promoted with "tons of blockquotes" were presumably promoted because they still had the requisite 1,500 charactes of original content. Either that or they were incorrectly promoted, which does happen occasionally when an inexperienced user contributes to maintenance of the project. Gatoclass (talk) 04:59, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Don't play games. I can link many of my pages that had blockquotes approved by you that, when removed, would not have made the 5x expansion. I always contain blockquotes in my works, and I always include quotations. The facts don't match your claims. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:02, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I very much doubt that is the case, however we have not always had the advantage of the prosesize tool, so maybe you did get a few undersized articles through, you should consider that a bonus. Gatoclass (talk) 06:00, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you haven't had the advantage of tools, then that means that the removal of the blockquotes probably only started because of the tool and that was from coincidence. And no, its not a "bonus". They got through because blockquotes and normal quotes are essential to the article. Every single one of my articles heavily quotes authors, critics, etc, because those are the standards of literary scholarship. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:13, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It means no such thing. Before I installed prosesize, I would just cut text directly from the article and then paste it in my sandbox, removing all the non-original content by hand. So I'm afraid your assumption is wrong. Gatoclass (talk) 17:05, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Really? All "unoriginal content"? So I guess before this date, you removed anything that was in the page first and only counted the new stuff added, right? Doing such would mean that the 5x expansion was radically rewritten to be a 6x expansion. Or did you misspeak like you did many times so far? Ottava Rima (talk) 17:27, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not at all. If there was a question regarding the length of expansion, I would do a copy and paste of the main body text of the unexpanded article, and then do a copy and paste of the main body text of the expanded article and compare the two. Pretty simple really. Gatoclass (talk) 04:37, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Great! The DKY process has improved and is now focusing on real achievement versus copy/paste blockquotes etc. of editors unwilling to summarize content in an encyclopedic style. Abuses are being curtailed. —Mattisse (Talk) 03:57, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Even a majority of the supporters don't want an article to be mostly block quotes. So if we're going to argue about how many block quotes are too many, then let's just use prosesize.js and don't count them at all, as we do now. Art LaPella (talk) 04:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Baby bathwater? And Dr Pda states that his should include blockquotes because Wikipedia defines it as prose. There is a difference between having a reasonable amount and having none. I have yet to see anyone create a whole article on blockquotes or use them in an unencyclopedic matter, and if that happens they can be dealt with. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:43, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - DYK is here to reward creative writing efforts, not creative copying efforts. There is no need to micromanage reasoned opinions posted on the suggestion page or admin judgment. If you think the count should include quotes, then post your own character count and let the admin make the decision. -- Suntag ☼ 09:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - So as to not exclude editors who expanded an article that contained a block quote, making their expansion ineligible for the 5x. \ / (⁂ | ※) 04:15, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bytes/Chars

The prose size is measured in terms of bytes, not characters.

Support

A stronger argument - most pages start with wiki markups before being expanded. If there is 1k worth of markups, then the page would have to expand over 5k worth of markups to be more than 5x expansion from markups. An addition of 4k worth of markups is very hard to accomplish, especially without any supporting text. Any fears of an over use of markups would not happen. Ottava Rima (talk) 02:23, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

Oppose markup (esp. infoboxes and references) should not be included in count. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 21:38, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - Infoboxes, reference templates, table format, and similar markup can add greatly to the byte length of an article without adding anything to the article's value to a user.
Note that the rule applies to both the pre- and post-expansion count, and that sometimes the pre-expansion article has a large byte count that is grossly inflated by the presence of invisible markup. For example, I've seen articles that had just one sentence of text but a byte count well in excess of 1K, due to the inclusion of huge infobox templates. --Orlady (talk) 22:22, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
One char =/= one byte, as Politzer and Orlady explain. As simple as that. --JayHenry (talk) 22:32, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - can't really add anything to what Orlady and Politizer have said. Adding, say, 1,000 bytes to the length of an article does not necessarily mean 1,000 characters of prose have been added. Reyk _YO! 22:35, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - per all that has been said above. —Mattisse (Talk) 23:01, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As above. Seraphim ♥ 01:43, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - definitely agree with the above. Infoboxes, {{cite}} formatting, tables, etc. can make a big difference and inflate the literal byte count of an expansion (or even pre-expansion, as Orlady noted), even if the prose itself has not been well-expanded. For this reason, I tend to strongly oppose the usage of byte estimations - since we're looking for a fivefold expansion of main prose, it's counterproductive to count the article's file size as a whole (markup and all). Jamie^☆S93 01:52, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Again, the focus should be on prose. There's nothing wrong with blockquotes. There are ample places where blockquotes are useful and necessary. But we should be writing articles about the subject (and thee quotes), not encouraging articles built around the blockquotes, infoboxes, sources, tables, lists, etc. Alansohn (talk) 02:39, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ick, no. Wizardman 02:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose technically 1 character does equal 1 byte as per an experiment I did but the problem is that the count is easily thrown off by adding code that doesn't show in the article (like a piped link). --D.B.^{talk•contribs} 02:46, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually (just to clarify), 1 character equals 1 byte (usually) but 1 byte does not equal one character; in that test they only came out equal because there was no wiki markup. If the test were, for example, [[Example]] , the count would yield 7 characters but 11 bytes. And then there are things like — (1 character, 7 bytes) and ™ (1 character, 8 bytes)...not to mention rarer and crazier stuff like __TOC__ (7 bytes, no characters and no measurable content). But you are correct about piped links and stuff. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 03:48, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yep and it works inversely with something like {{convert|20|m2}}, which returns 17 bytes but 28 characters. --D.B.^{talk•contribs} 04:12, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose per all the above. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 02:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Strong oppose - Per Orlady. I find this proposal to be just plain ridiculous. Gatoclass (talk) 03:40, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Per all of the above. Additionally, I don't see what problem this proposal is trying to solve. BuddingJournalist 06:26, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - DYK is here to reward creative writing effort, not creative copying effort. -- Suntag ☼ 09:39, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose mostly for the reasons that Orlady describes. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 17:02, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose While I agree with Ottava that there probably won't be a time where counting byte will make a page ineligible, we may as well make sure that the one article it does will be eligible without too much drama. \ / (⁂ | ※) 04:17, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Status of the Unwritten Rules

Added at Ottava's request. \ / (⁂ | ※) 22:38, 14 December 2008 (UTC) That the Unwritten Rules should be...[reply]

Adopted as Policy

Kept as Suggested Guidelines

Support That's what they are now, and they work; see Gatoclass's comments above. They're good for regulars who need to keep track of details, and not necessary for new contributors to make nominations. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 22:52, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The rules are such that a number of unique situations can arise where they are difficult to interpret. It's useful to have consistent ways to interpret these recurring questions. Through years of helping at T:TDYK, Art collected what seemed to be the standard response to these situations. They should of course be kept (we'll have to deal with the underlying situations regardless), but more prominently made available for those interested. --JayHenry (talk) 22:53, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For now - maybe one day adopted formally when we have stopped arguing about them. Johnbod (talk) 01:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support - no reason not to support, as they are all common sense rules, a compendium of Art's wisdom that has made DYK so pleasant and simple for so long. —Mattisse (Talk) 01:55, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - The unwritten rules are useful and have worked well for a long time. Nothing's broken, so nothing needs fixing. --Orlady (talk) 02:06, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep The unwritten rules have provided a level of informality that has worked so far. Alansohn (talk) 02:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support The unwritten rules are actually a compendium of consensus and practice at DYK---fleshed out over the course of thousands of hooks and bytes of discussion on this page. The guidelines were already in practice and widely used. Art just took the step of collecting these "unwritten" rule into one coherent document. While consensus, can and does change, there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Agne^Cheese/^Wine 02:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but per guidelines, consensus can only be determined through proper channels and claimed only with community involvement. Having a set of rules on a user page cannot be considered as such. Being widely used is also not consensus, as was stated above by multiple people. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:01, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid your wiki-lawyering is a little off bat here. Everyday on Wikipedia there are hundreds of discussions taking place across article's talk, projects and policy pages. The eventual outcome of those discussions will be the consensus for that discussion. Do we take every disagreement over category organization, BE vs AmE usage, or capitalization issue that arise to Village Pump? The next time that the Wine Project has a dispute over what should be included in Template:Wines should I petition an admin to include a "Watchlist notice" so that the community can be fully aware of the dispute before we can get a consensus decision? Of course not and, frankly, that legalistic interpretation of WP:CONSENSUS is downright absurd. There is a difference between changing one of the Five Pillars and a Wikiproject (which DYK is) establishing guidelines for themselves. While the former would certainly warrant widespread community involvement in order to truly generate a consensus decision; the scale needed for consensus of the latter is considerably smaller. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 03:18, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Please post links to something even close to something like this that said that the newly created unwritten rules should be official. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:32, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ottava, it is not about *the page* titled "Unwritten Rules" (that is merely a compilation of practices and guidelines already in place). Whether or not that page moves to main space is actually irrelevant. These rules weren't decided collectively all at once, but rather as part of a long, laborious process. Up at the top of this page is a link to 35 pages of archives, hundreds of thousands of bytes of discussion that hammered out a consensus among the people who care about DYK on all these finer points. As the growing number of "Support" votes on this poll is showing, the consensus is pretty consistent. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 03:49, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Not everyone feels that way, especially with the unwritten rules suddenly appearing this summer. There are people even complaining about "rule creep" above but yet the unwritten rules are exactly that. DYK use to be dominated by loose definitions and IAR to be as inclusive as possible. Not including in blockquotes because people don't think famous authors should be quoted shows that we have clearly lost this way. I really wonder what Raul would think about the changes and I am tempted to ask him. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:02, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Then go do it. The suspense is killing us. Don't leave us hangin'. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 04:10, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Raul? Is he one of the dissatisfied editors? Please ask him to to register his opinion in the poll. —Mattisse (Talk) 04:16, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Read the project page if you need to find out who Raul is and his connection to DYK. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
O.K., Ottava. Read the project page. So he had the first DYK for Pencil sharpener. So? (Maybe you should add some inline citations to it, as it probably would not pass muster now.) —Mattisse (Talk) 05:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ottava, these "Unwritten Rules" existed long before Art took the time to actually write down what was already in practice. This is certainly not a recent thing. While I don't have the time or energy to search all 35 pages of archives, I did remember this conversation from back in Dec 2007! And JayHenry was talking about what was observed as being already in practice by that point. The only thing recent is that one of your articles happened to be rejected and not WP:IAR in. I can tell you from experience that I've approved some of your articles in the past that were borderline with expansion but I thought that they were lovely articles that should be featured so I "ticked" off that the size was good even if was a tad short of a true expansion. As a reviewer, I would have probably approved the Samson article but I can not fault a fellow reviewer for fairly applying the guidelines. If anything, this demonstrates *my mistake* and those of other DYK reviewers in not fairly applying the guidelines to some of your earlier articles because now you are using those past articles as a sign that somehow the "Unwritten rules" didn't have long established consensus. They've always had, we've just been more liberal in the past in using IAR but now, I have to say, your actions are making people less incline to utilize IAR in the future if this is what we have to look forward to. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 04:25, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Agne, I've been around for a long time and not once has blockquotes ever came up as an issue, or anything else. This didn't happen until this September. Thats when these "unwritten rules" became popular. Furthermore, community consensus does not go into effect based on hearsay, common ideas, etc. You can't use admin powers for such things. DYK is the use of an admin power because you are editing the main page. Consensus negates what happened in the creation of these rules. And if there was some sort of consensus about what was "prose", it obviously contradicts what established guidelines say. Furthermore, DYK use to only require 1,000 characters. Things have been progressively trying to make it harder, not easier, to get a page listed. Don't act as if the unwritten rules have been around forever when this system use to be very lax and very inclusive. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You mean, things were sloppy for a while. Even SandyGeorgia complained about sloppy DYKs on the main page some months ago. Since you have been around "forever", you know about all the previous discussions and undoubtedly participated in them, given your level of participation and interest in DYK. So, why are you not remembering all the past history? In any event, all standards on Wikipedia have risen over time. Only relatively recently did FAC require inline citations. Are you advocating a lowering of standards instead? —Mattisse (Talk) 05:17, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Complaints arose from people allowing biased hooks, copyright violations, or other problems that are covered under other guidelines and do not need to be duplicated on DYK. And this is the very beginning of a process, not at the end of a process. We should not raise the bar and scare off new people from contributing. We should be as inclusive as possible. Furthermore, not approving the blockquote/quote as prose destroys the ability to promote articles of quality, as quotes and blockquotes are a fundamental part of academic writing. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:30, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Wrong. Even as recently as a couple months ago, people were complaining about DYK articles with "only one inline citation in the whole article." They may have been complaints about that other stuff as well, but that doesn't mean people weren't saying the bar was too low, because they certainly were. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 05:32, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Complaining about a DYK article with only one citation is the same as complaining about a non-DYK with only one citation. There is no difference. There are many articles without any citations. DYK requires one for the hook. Their problem is with uncited articles, not with DYK. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support per Agne27. They were slowly added one by one. Each unwritten rule had consensus discussed on this very talk page, Ottava. Royalbroil 03:13, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If that was true, why weren't they added as official? That doesn't add up nor is it proper consensus. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:32, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
We were concerned that the rules would get too long for the average contributor / instruction creep. Royalbroil 03:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You seriously believe that having a second set of rules on a second page that are applied as if they are standard rules is not adding in more rules and not instruction creep? All secondary rules should be removed if you want to get rid of instruction creep. The guide should be kept vague on purpose to be as inclusive as possible. If there is a copyright issue, solve it. If there is duplicated information, fix it. If it needs to be merged, do so. Needs to be deleted, do so. There are other ways off DYK to fix problematic pages. This was unnecessary instruction added to the project and adds only confusion. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What is meant by "official", Ottava? There are very few "official" documents on Wikipedia, if you mean policies. Have you read Product, process, policy and consensus? Policies are the last step, not the first. —Mattisse (Talk) 04:30, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support for now. BorgQueen (talk) 03:28, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support as temporary measure only - see my comment in the "Comments" section below. Gatoclass (talk) 04:27, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support something like this (the name "Unwritten Rules" is obsolete, and they shouldn't have just my name on them—I agree with Gatoclass). Simply deleting the Unwritten Rules would send us back to June, when only Did You Know regulars could understand the rules because they were truly unwritten. There weren't nearly as many nominations. We spent half our time re-arguing the same issues all the time, and with Ottava Rima around, I predict it would be a lot more than half. Art LaPella (talk) 04:55, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Art, you can't honestly claim that. You really can't. I participated on DYK for a very long time, on this account and my prior one. There were rarely any fights until your unwritten rules came about, and the mere attempt right there to claim that there were rules that weren't written yet applied is false. There were no other standards until you created the unwritten rules which clogged up the process and created all of the problems. The guidelines were simple, easy, and very inclusionary. We must return to that. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:05, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
With all due respect, the only thing clogging up DYK right now is you. Before you started disrupting everything a few days ago, we were cutting through nominations like a warm knife through butter. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 05:22, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I was the one that started a fight on my own hook that was already operating under pre-approved IAR? Really? That is backwards logic of the worse kind. Politizer, DYK worked well until the unwritten rules were made. The unwritten rules weren't that big of a problem until people like you started trying to enforce them. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:40, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, actually, you were. Here is a revision of T:TDYK where the hook you're referring to may be viewed, and here is the revision of that article at the time I was commenting on it (a revision that clearly no one at DYK would have accepted anyway, so you have no basis for saying I was unjustly enforcing some imaginary rule; the article had only a single source, no wikilinks, and no appreciable lead-in section). I'll let the other readers decide who "started a fight." —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 05:57, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You weren't "commenting" on it. You were acting disruptive and as soon as you were responded to you started a campaign against multiple DYK. Even Gato told you to stop because you were prejudicing things. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:15, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Wrongo. I was pointing out what needed to be fixed in the articles. That's what I do with everyone. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:17, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure people adding "penis" to articles feel that they are doing the same. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, yeah, because adding cleanup tags [3][4] is the same as vandalism. Seriously? How immature are you? —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:48, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Templating a page demanding that wikilinks be added instead of actually doing it yourself while you know that there was a complex process going on is completely inappropriate. There is really no excuse for just randomly templating like that on normal circumstances. Ottava Rima (talk) 16:03, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Try "I look at a hundred DYK hooks a day and cleaning up your article is your job, not mine." Anyway, who cares—the template got you to add the links, now didn't it? And what about the {{single source}} template, you are conveniently ignoring that one. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
You are not an admin. You are not DYK's boss. You are not anything but one person. I think you need to keep that in mind, because the contrary is what caused these problems. Ottava Rima (talk) 16:12, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My comment was aimed mainly at Bedford, who remembers the problems we had when the unwritten rules were truly unwritten. Art LaPella (talk) 15:56, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Did you not see that Bedford wants your unwritten rules removed? If you posit him as such an expert via experience, I think his vote shows that things have gotten worse, not better. Ottava Rima (talk) 16:01, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I saw; hence my puzzled explanation to him. I've given up on debating you. Art LaPella (talk) 18:14, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There is no puzzle. Your solution was only a hindrance. How you cannot see that, I don't know. But Bedford sees it quite clearly. You are too fixated on your own rules and creating them that you forgot what the problems were and only expanded them. This is a common problem. The only solution is to delete your rules and return to a time before they expanded the problems at hand. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:23, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
These are not Art's rules. WP:OWN does not apply. They are everyone's rules which apply to everyone. Art was nice enough to compile them to his userpage. He did not create or decide them. He merely compiled the list of secondary rules as time went on. I was here to witness their compilation. Were you? He should have compiled them in Wikipedia space so we wouldn't be wasting our space with this unneeded discussion. Royalbroil 13:04, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia space would be better if that's the consensus, but no rules reorganization would have prevented this discussion, as the Wikipedia:IDIDNTHEARTHAT response below demonstrates for the umpteenth time. Art LaPella (talk) 18:17, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think a lot of people will be worried with the declaration that a set of ideas written on a user page now "apply to everyone". Ottava Rima (talk) 16:42, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support - There's nothing wrong with a WikiProject having guidelines for its operation and these have served WikiProject DYK well. They have long been part of a general agreement among the members of DYK, each of whom have had an opportunity to review and comment on the rules. As a natural and inherent product of wiki-editing at DYK, the consensus about Art's Unwritten Rules developed through collaboration at DYK and is reflective of how DYK editors now work with each other. We all owe Art a debt of thanks for taking the lead on recording the operating parameters of DYK in relation to DYK hooks appearing on the Main Page, but it is time to move the rules in-house. DYK has never let a label stand in the way of common sense, and whether these are moved in-house as rules, guidelines, or what have you, they will continue to be used as needed to provide reasoned analysis for the DYK admins to make their decisions. -- Suntag ☼ 09:36, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support Simply to avoid the 'that isn't written anywhere' comment that will inevitably arise should a nom be deemed inappropriate with one of these rules as reasoning. \ / (⁂ | ※) 04:26, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Just that would be fine. - Mailer Diablo 18:17, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Deleted

This allows for more rules to creep in and causes conflicting views. Much of the current wording is left ambiguous on purpose to allow both sides to be happy. If a strict admin doesn't want to approve they don't have to. If a leniant admin does, they should be given the chance. We should be inclusive, not exclusive. Ottava Rima (talk) 22:45, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Ottava for the same reasons.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 23:01, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also agreeing with Ottava Rima here. Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page | Contribs)} 04:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note _{(this will almost certainly be interpreted as offensive, in a way I don't intend it to be, but oh well, I think it needs to be said)} To whoever is tallying the votes in this poll, please be aware that the above user has never edited T:TDYK and is the same user who took Gatoclass to ANI over Gatoclass's voting choice. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 04:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I noticed Peachey88 sudden emergence in both places. Perhaps Ottava's mass of disgruntled emailers are beginning to emerge? —Mattisse (Talk) 04:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Considered that I read a-lot of pages and only post when i feel needed? Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page | Contribs)} 05:22, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is cross listed at Village Pump Proposals. Everyone is welcome to comment. Since this goes on the mainpage, everyone is welcome. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:35, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Moved into project space for wider participation

As Gatoclass suggests below, these unwritten rules have consensus support at the moment; they are the best we have. However pages in userspace generally discourage broad participation, so these unwritten rules may not accurately reflect long standing practises or the current desires of the wider community. As such they should be moved into the project namespace where others can more freely alter them, and discussion can occur on the talk page.

John Vandenberg ^(chat) 17:21, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thankyou for the support John, but I really feel this is not the time to start a new poll on this topic. Let's get the other issues out of the way first, and then maybe when things have quietened down in a week or two, we can think about running a poll like this. The present climate is not the most conducive to rational discussion I think. Gatoclass (talk) 01:15, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

I think this poll has proposed the wrong alternatives. The question should not be whether or not Art's "Unwritten Rules" should be policy or guidelines, because our existing rules are not defined as "policy" or "guidelines" either. The question should simply be whether the unwritten rules should be given official status by being moved into wikipedia space rather than being left in user space. I strongly support moving them into wikipedia space, but this is neither making them "policy" nor keeping them as "guidelines", it's simply making clear that these rules have consensus support and are not merely the result of one user's whims.

However, since this poll is already well under way, I feel I have little choice but to support the misnamed "keep as guidelines" proposal, but only as a temporary measure. Gatoclass (talk) 04:24, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can change the title to "moving to mainspace". I'm sure everyone who voted is watching, as most are responding. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you, Gatoclass. I think Art's "Unwritten Rules" should remain as they are. But it seemed, maybe I am wrong, the the alternative to "Support" was proposed deletion of them. —Mattisse (Talk) 04:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The winds seems to have brought agitation to our quiet, happy hamlet in the woods. Hold strong, mates. Hold strong. -- Suntag ☼ 08:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think Gatoclass has hit this on the head, so I have added a new poll option above "Moved into project space for wider participation". Feel free to tweak my summary. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 17:21, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for adding the new poll option...but, given that the poll has been going on for a while now anyway (and that its original intention as a poll has, naturally, derailed), I don't know how much useful information we'll be able to get from it, since a lot of people have already voted on "keep as a guideline" since it was the only good option at the time. In other words, if we don't see a lot of votes for your new option, it probably doesn't mean that people don't support it, but just that people already voted before that option was available. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:54, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Moving them forward would only be verifying them as legitimate. The only appropriate measure is to delete them completely and not allow anyone with such notions to feel as if they have a legitimate stance. These are a hindrance to the system as a whole and only cause problems. They are also created by a select few and are opposite to inclusive. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:06, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey buddy.... POLL. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - I was urged by someone offline to WP:SNOW close all this (using the same reasoning as I just used above, that this is divisive/non productive, and the reasoning that the answers are obvious (hence the snow part)) but I have to say, while most of these options have rather a wide margin one way, I'm not seeing that closing these would be a good idea. How long is this supposed to run for? Certainly more than a day or two... let this run. At the end, it will reveal a good sense of how the "regulars" feel. We need to be careful to listen carefully to all views, not just those of the regulars, though. ++Lar: t/c 03:00, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You could possibly close the bytes/characters poll... but I don't think there is any real need. It has only been two days now (?), so probably leave it for a few more. \ / (⁂ | ※) 04:10, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was again urged to close this, as the new comments have slowed to a trickle or less. I'll do so tomorrow (giving a week, more or less) unless there is strong objection, so get any last minute views in, ok? ++Lar: t/c 15:06, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

A limit to the number of articles used in one hook?

Hey everyone, I was wondering if we should think about implementing a limit to the amount of articles that could be used in a single DYK hook, I have no objection to having a double or even a triple hook, but with the shortage of hooks that we've been having, I think having 5 article hook is a little much especially considering the hook shortage we've been having ever sense we upped the amount of hooks per update to 8. Does anyone think we should cap the amount of articles allowed in a hook and require any other articles to get there own hooks? Or should we just leave it to the discretion of the user who is approving the hook? Thoughts? All the Best, --Mifter (talk) 00:59, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My hooks tend to be 4+. Its easier to list a series of hooks that are thematically the same, especially when you create a list and build new pages to fill out the list. If you relax the rules some, you can get more hooks in that way. Ottava Rima (talk) 01:03, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that no such rule is needed and would be opposed to adding it. I see nothing problematic about 5 (or more) related articles included in a hook. If there's a hook shortage we should think of ways to reward other types of new content, perhaps such as extensively cleaned up/rewritten from scratch articles. --JayHenry (talk) 01:07, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I don't have a big problem with lots of hooks. Especially when they're closely related, in usual circumstances it's probably better to get them all out in one fell swoop than to give the reader several updates in a row with the same stuff. When there's a shortage of hooks, we can always lengthen the interval between updates. In my experience, it seems that DYK reviewers have encouraged combined hooks where possible. Of course, from a technical standpoint, the {{DYKsug}} template is currently only built to take 5 articles.... if you want to nominate more than that, you're stuck not using the template, muahahaha! —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 01:29, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I oppose the notion of having a limit on the number of articles in a hook. Putting multiple articles in a single hook is a way of reducing the total number of hooks, which historically has been a great help in avoiding backlogs. If it turns out we don't need to do this anymore because of the greater efficiency of the bot, I still see no reason to impose an artificial limit on the number of articles in one hook, because it should already be clear from the rules that there are limits to the acceptable length of a hook in any case. Gatoclass (talk) 04:40, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Economising is good. I thought I did a favour with a few group hooks to save space for everyone. no limit please. YellowMonkey (bananabucket) 05:54, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, I think this limit is unnecessary. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 12:42, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I support no limit to the number of articles in a hook, even if this means that the 200 character hook limit is broken. Royalbroil 13:00, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For group hooks, we could just say that the lenght of the hooks should not be more than 200 characters as measured by one of the DYK article names and the remainder of the hook. In other words, the measurement is done by removing all the DYK article names except the shortest DYK article name and count that plus the remainder of the hook characters (not that this has ever been an issue). -- Suntag ☼ 20:59, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the general consensus here that multiple-article DYKs are great. For the hooks, surely just saying "don't worry about 200 if you've got a lot of links" would do it! We can trim it to a reasonable length if need be on a case-by-case basis, without worrying just now over how to count it... Shimgray | talk | 03:15, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Case-by-case" is what I love to hear. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 03:33, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For now, "Unwritten" Rule C3 just says "A hook introducing more than one article is an exception to the hook length rule." Art LaPella (talk) 04:56, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, that's what I've always been using as my guideline for multi-article hooks. Of course, it depends somewhat on the number and length of the article titles (I'm more willing to accept a long hook that has 5 articles than a long hook that has 2; if it's just 2 articles, I would still aim to get it around 150-175 if that's possible without making the hook ridiculous) and on the length of the hook being proposed (no one is ever going to accept a 400-character hook, no matter how interesting it is or how many articles are crammed in...but 230 characters is something we can swing, if the circumstances are right). That's what I love about being human—we can make on-the-spot judgments about stuff like these, and our judgments are generally awesome because the other people working at DYK are smart and know what they're doing, which is awesome. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 06:22, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Humanity is nice, but being inanimate always seems appealing. :) 07:24, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Wellll... I do sometimes feel like a bot when I'm going through making sure all the refs are after the punctuation.... —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:25, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You know there's a script which can do that, right? (User:Gimmetrow/fixRefs.js) Dr pda (talk) 09:15, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hot damn! I just used it and it was amazing. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 21:42, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Template news

For anyone out there who uses {{DYKproblem}}.... I've added some new functionality to it. Adding the text |nominator=no when you call the template will cause it to generate a slightly different message, which instead of saying "Hi! Your nom has been reviewed" says "Hi! Someone nominated your article, and it has been reviewed." This is because I occasionally find myself notifying article creators who did not nominate their article and might not even know that it has been nominated (because if things need to be clarified about the article or nom, I usually figure the creator can answer those questions better than the nominator) and they've sometimes been like "what? I never nominated that." So anyway, there's that.

Also, after a suggestion from Suntag, I created {{DYKre}}, a really simple template that can be used to notify a DYK reviewer that you have addressed his concerns (so basically the opposite of {{DYKproblem}}, which is for reviewers to notify nominators/creators that there are concerns). You don't have to use it, and in fact I don't know if it's necessary (given that most of us reviewers watch the page pretty closely anyway) but it's there if you want. I'm sure there are problems with it, and they will emerge as it gets used more. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 19:00, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I just used the nominator=no thing for real for the first time, and it seems to have worked nicely. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:35, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nice! I'd been thinking that something equivalent to |nominator=no would be useful, so thanks. Olaf Davis | Talk 22:51, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Credit mistake

I just went through my recent DYK credits and found five December 2008 writing credits that should have been nomination credits. The five were (i) Careysburg, Liberia, (ii) David Ross (businessman), (iii) Taping River, (iv) California Avocado Commission, and (v) Eugene Goodman. I traced down Careysburg, Liberia (it took a while). This diff shows that I was listed as a nominator for Careysburg, Liberia. This diff shows the move of the information to the Next update template put me as a maker via {{DYKmake|Careysburg, Liberia|Suntag}}. It should have read {{DYKnom|Careysburg, Liberia|Suntag}}. This seems to be a significant problem as it is a mistake anybody can make in moving hooks from the suggestion page to the Next update page. It seems likely that other editors are receiving writing credits when it should only be nom credit. Can anyone think of a way to fix this problem? Perhaps a bot can read the credits in the history of the suggestion page and compare them to those listed at the queue pages. I'm not sure that is even possible. -- Suntag ☼ 22:13, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I try to make sure everyone gets the right credits - mistakes happen of course. The main problem is that DYKmake is the default, and it's not that hard to forget. Also, the amount of third party nominations are generally limited to DYK regulars like yourself.

I'll try to remain vigilant about it - I do try my best to make sure the credits are right but no-one is perfect. \ / (⁂ | ※) 23:22, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are several people who update the next update page. Perhaps there are some modifications that we can make to the templates. We can modify Template:DYKsuggestion to move the position of |nominator= as it appears on the suggestion page. Also, would it help to modify Template:Did you know/Next update/Clear to include some default {{DYKnom|Example|Editor}}? -- Suntag ☼ 23:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think that this has always been a problem. Some editors correct the templates they receive themselves. Personally I let the errors remain because sometimes I gain undeserved credit and other times my contribution is not fully creditted.(aaah) But we're all volunteers and the job we are doing is worthwhile even if it is sometimes imperfect. Oh and Merry Xmas to one and all Victuallers (talk) 23:48, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Don't change the Suggestion template. The nominator field is sufficiently far away from the creator/expander field that you notice it by itself nine time out of ten. I'll try working with the Clear template to add a few of the {{DYKnom|Example|Editor}} templates. \ / (⁂ | ※) 23:55, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done You can see the change at this page here. \ / (⁂ | ※) 23:59, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Great! I'm gonna press my luck and see if the bot guys can do something for us. See Wikipedia:Bot_requests#DYKCheckbot. (I really miss having our own in-house bot guy.) -- Suntag ☼ 00:10, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(outdent) I agree with \ / that the |nominator= field in the template shows up nicely far away from the other stuff. But if anyone thinks it would be useful, I could also change the template so that it underlines or bolds (on the actual page; it wouldn't change the way anything looks in the edit window) the words Created by, Nominated by, etc. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 00:13, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A bot I don't think would work. It would need to know the hook has been moved, look in the edit history and retrieve a field. Either that or the update becomes entirely automated, which would not account for any editorial concerns. \ / (⁂ | ※) 00:28, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, a bit of code probably could fix this I think. If the DYKsug template formated the "nominator" field as {{DYKnom|Article|Editor}}, then updaters could just grab the string and move it straight to the next update page. Likewise with the article creator. Gatoclass (talk) 04:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh gosh, that actually is an awesome idea, it would save a huge amount of clicking and copy-pasting. I'm gonna throw together an example and then see what you guys think of the output. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:39, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'll second that. What a great idea. The entire string could be copied over when there is no approved ALT hook. And if there is an approved ALT hook, the remainder of the string should be set up to be copied and pasted into the Next Update. This would eliminate a need for Wikipedia:Bot_requests#DYKCheckbot. -- Suntag ☼ 18:23, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've thrown something together; it's not done yet, but just so I can gauge whether or not I'm even heading in the right direction, you can see the output in my sandbox here. (You can see the code here, but I wouldn't recommend it, because it's terrifying.) This does something a little different than what you originally proposed; it doesn't mess with the |nominator= and other fields, but it just creates a bunch of fields called |credits=, which don't do anything other than sit there (ie, the template itself doesn't interact with those fields, they just sit there nice and pretty so you can grab them from the edit window). ^{(Note to interested people: this is because the |nominator= and other fields are what the template {{DYKsuggestion}} uses to actually generate the hook and nomination and stuff that you see when you read T:TDYK, so messing with those for credits purposes would make things very hairy, as far as I can tell.)} If you go to the sandbox link I gave above, you can see that a) the display looks the same as it does now; and b) once you click "edit," there are nice {{DYKmake|Example|User}} and {{DYKnom|Example|User}} templates auto-generated in there for every creator/collaborator/expander/nominator, and for every article. There are only two big problems I can see that still need to be worked out:

Right now, if you nominate a single article with only one creator/expander/etc. (which is, of course, the usual case), it creates a long page of empty |credits= fields, which we don't want. I've been working for a long time on getting the template to only display fields that are actually filled in, and it's been difficult, but if we want to go ahead with this plan it'll have to be fugured out; more information here (a thread that's currently archived because we abandoned that plan, but if we want to do this it'll have to be opened back up).

If people make an unusual nomination (for example, more than 3 expanders, more than 5 articles, etc.), that isn't handled by any of this, so people doing the promotion always need to look out to make sure there aren't extra people need credited, or extra comments the nominator left, etc. This shouldn't be much different than the status quo, since we have plenty of people who don't use the template and in those cases the promoter will be doing stuff by hand anyway.

Anyway...sorry if any of that is confusing! I'm just trying to keep you posted on what I'm doing, before I go too far ahead and then find out that I'm doing the wrong thing or something. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:20, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of suggestions. Any chance you could dump the "credits=" strings altogether and just have the series of {{DYKmake|Editor|Example}} fields instead? This is because I would have to trim off all the "creator=" strings instead of just being able to copy and paste all the strings I want with one shot.

Also, if you can't figure out a way to stop generating all the blank fields, I think just three creator fields and one nom field would do, we very rarely get hooks that have more than that number of contributors. Also I can't see much point generating separate credit fields for each and every hook, again one would be enough for most situations. Gatoclass (talk) 16:10, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, thanks for the suggestions! Here's a new version, with the credit templates formatted in a bulleted list so they can be pasted directly into T:DYK/N as is (again, you can go to the edit window to see how it looks). As for whether or not to generate separate fields for each article...I haven't updated Next in a long time so I'm a little rusty on how it's done, but is it standard to credit the creator/expander for each article bolded in the hook? (That's what Ottava Rima has been getting credit for, for example.) I thought that was the standard, but if you don't think it's necessary to have that many credit templates, it's just a simple matter of deleting them from the DYKsug template, so either way it shouldn't be to difficult. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:40, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can also experiment yourself to try different combinations of things and see if the template generates the credit templates that you want. Just paste the following into the sandbox, and add/delete/fill-in fields however you like.

{{subst:User:Politizer/DYKsugdev
 | article=
 | hook=
 | creator=
 | nominator=
}}

You can add up to 5 articles, up to 3 collaborators, and up to 3 expanders. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That looks great! However, I think you need to expand the maximum number of articles to eight. Eight is the maximum number we've had in a hook, and we've had plenty of hooks with at least half a dozen. Gatoclass (talk) 02:20, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've expanded the max to 8 (only in dev right now; the {{DYKsug}} being used is still the old version). Also, as for your comment about how we don't need separate credit fields for each author, I've had a change of heart and I agree with you...specifically, because of this complicated nom. With multiple articles, there's a chance that different individuals had a different role in each article, and the template currently doesn't allow people to specify that, so I realized there's no way we have the power right now to auto-generate correct credit templates for noms that complicated. Given that multi-article noms are relatively rare anyway, I just made it so that if there is an |article2= specified, it automatically generates no noms—the idea being that if there are multiple articles, it's going to require a human to figure out the credits anyway, so there's no point fooling people with inaccurate credit templates. The newest version can be seen here (scroll down to the last one, in the edit window, to see how it doesn't generate credit templates for multi-article noms).

The last minor thing I need to do is make it not generate credit for the |creator= field if the |expander= field is already filled in. This is an issue that came up a few days ago when someone noted that some nominators are just trying to fill in as many fields as they can, so when they nominated a newly expanded article they would also list whoever created the article years and years ago...which is obviously not someone we want to credit. The current version of the template in use works to that, if someone specifies an expander and a creator when they call the template, only an expander winds up on T:TDYK (the "creator" just disappears into cyberspace); I should probably try to get the same thing to happen with the credits.

Once that is worked out, I don't see anything preventing me from moving these changes over to the real template, assuming no one has any objections. Once I do, I'll notify all the DYK regulars at their talk pages, so that if anyone hasn't been paying attention to this page they won't be surprised next time they go to populate Next. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:14, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've done the stuff I mentioned above. I believe everything is ready. I'll let it sit for a little whilte just in case anyone has objections, then I'll update the real template and notify everyone. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:46, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't have time to check the sandbox yet, but it sounds to me as though you have all bases covered. Looking forward to seeing it in action! Gatoclass (talk) 06:07, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Awards encourage mass-production of low-interest DYKs

I don't know if this has been a topic previously, but it strikes me that the process of awarding editors for producing a profuse number of DYKs also tends to compromise the entire section on the front page by an overabundance of very bland hooks. It does not seem as there is any shortage of nominations, so perhaps a policy change to jack up the standards would be in place? __meco (talk) 12:17, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We usually do try to pass hooks that are interesting. If the suggested hook is not, then we try to find some interesting fact from the article. If there isn't anything, then most likely it won't go on the main page. That has happened before. I'm talking about really boring and plain stuff here like "X was a something...", you know what I mean? The "interestingness" of the hook depends on the reader and the subject too. I mean, someone interested in animals won't think that it's an interesting fact that bullets of several calibers can fit into the same gun, and someone interested in military matters won't see the importance of in which oceans the dolphin lives. So we can only judge the absolutely terrible ones, ad it depends on the reviewer just like deciding an article's suitability. Chamal ^talk 12:29, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with meco. The "created or 5x expanded within 5 days" rule encourages the submission of stub-size articles that have just enough citations to pass DYK inspection but far from adequate coverage. Improving an article beyond that level requires a lot of research, and often at least 1 re-structure, which can seldom be done well within 5 days. So the "within 5 days" rule encourages superficial work. I'd suggest replacing "created or 5x expanded within 5 days" with "promoted to B-class or better in the last 5 days", and allow submission of additional facts from existing articles that get promoted from B-class to GA, A-class and / or FA. --Philcha (talk) 12:36, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ideas like that have been floated before and, for better or for worse, fortunately or unfortunately, I imagine that's never going to happen. DYK needs a rapid turnover of a large number of nominations, and the kind of qualitative evaluation that this plan would require would never allow us to get through the number of nominations we have to get through on a daily basis. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:42, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The advantage of the the 5x rule is that it is objective and easy to confirm. The article rating system has neither of these properties, ratings are subjective and based more upon the last reviewers opinion that measurable properties. The likely result of this change is increased wikidrama as edit wars erupt trying to determine the rating of nominated articles or otherwise qualified articles are (improperly?/justifiably?) demoted shortly before their nominations expire and are removed from consideration. --Allen3 ^talk 12:57, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(e/c) This again, will deviate us from the original objective of DYK (that of providing newly developed articles a chance to get noticed by other editors and give them a chance to be improvemed), just like including GAs in DYK. If this is implemented, then I guess the number of articles being submitted will go down, which means we probably will have to change the entire way DYK functions. But I think this is a better idea than including only GAs. The problems such as an increase in the number of unsuitable articles (ones not meeting necessary criteria) being submitted for reassessment will be there, just like in the GA suggestion. And the problems like everyone not being able to do it, some wikiprojects not having particular classes etc will also be there. We'll have to wait and see what the others think. Anyhow, I'm against the idea of including newly promoted FAs, since they have their own chance to appear on the main page and we don't need to put up the same thing twice. That room can be given to another article instead. Chamal ^talk 13:01, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd just like to point out that what you are bringing up is an issue different from mine (although they both have to do with the quality of the DYK items). __meco (talk) 13:03, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK then, let's get back to the subject :) What do you think about what I said first? Can we create a guideline to measure how interesting a hook is? I think it depends on the reviewer (which is what has been happening all this time). Any suitable alternative will be welcome. But I think most people who are regular submitters of hooks (and people who are most likely to get those awards, and also the one who have received them) here create and nominate pretty decent articles, since they are pretty much experienced and know their way around here by now. I'm not sure if the awards have much to do with it. Chamal ^talk 13:11, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if calling for an immediate action is warranted. Also, as I have been noticing hooks from one particular editor, I don't want to give examples as this would tend to denigrate this individual's contributions on the whole and probably only end up in a squabble. Perhaps suffice for now that this subject has been raised, and those who are regulars in DYK work have this in the back of their minds in the near future. Then maybe some will have pondered the issue after having made their own related observations and some suggestions might be presented also? __meco (talk) 13:26, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Your concern is appreciated, but if there is a problem with boring hooks I don't think it's a problem that DYK is creating, it's just a problem that happens to fit well into DYK. (And for the record, I don't think it's a problem...but anyway.) The editors here who submit a lot of articles, it's not as if they have women and money piled up at their feet—a DYK award isn't a huge deal, it's just something kind of nice. I'm no mind reader, but I don't think most of the editors here are doing it for the award; they're creating these new articles because it's what they like to do, and DYK happens to be a good place for them to put a lot of those articles, but they would still be doing it even if DYK didn't exist. That's my impression, at least. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:37, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Relevant to the general subject of hook interest, I note that no article statistics have been collected for December 15 and 16. Is something broken? --Orlady (talk) 16:11, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That happened for 2 days in the middle of October, too...it seems to be a problem with the tool, not with any of our articles in particular. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:13, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to read the disclaimer at the bottom of the traffic site: "This is very much a beta service and may disappear or change at any time." Guess what happened to the stats in last July? --BorgQueen (talk) 16:30, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware that it's a beta product, but that generally means it's helpful to communicate about things that don't work as expected. In this case, http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ has the stats for December 15 and 16, so it's "only" a matter of processing the data. --Orlady (talk) 17:10, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Communicating with us won't help that much. You might want to contact User:Henrik, who maintains the site. --BorgQueen (talk) 17:15, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just remove the awards. Awards are silly nonsense anyway. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:15, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is this the same user who just spent two weeks complaining over the loss of a single DYK award out of about forty submissions? Gatoclass (talk) 02:28, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Gato, don't even start. That is 100% wrong and you know it. I don't want an award. I wanted Milton to have hooks for his birthday. How can you not understand that? The hooks were up anyway. That wasn't the problem. The problem was a fight that made it so that 12 hours of the 30 hour period did not contain hooks on Milton. I won't begin to start with how your attempted characterization right there makes me feel. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:22, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Your complaints began when I debolded an article in a hook that had half a dozen other eligible articles, it was going on the front page anyway. Same with the other disqualification. So I find this sudden expression of disinterest a tad hard to credit. Gatoclass (talk) 03:52, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Could we just not get into going after each other, guys? I am not sure that "Just remove the awards" was a completely helpful thing to say at this point but don't compound it, Gato... and don't bite back Ottava. Please. Do remember that this page will be viewed by some of our newest editors and let's all be excellent to each other. ++Lar: t/c 03:28, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(deindent) I spent a great deal of time updating DYK 2.5 years ago, and this has always been a bit of an issue. On the one hand, we want to encourage new articles; on the other hand we want the main page to be interesting, and to attract new editors to start-up articles. Finding that happy medium is challenging. My personal bias was to encourage new article writers by trying to make sure as many articles made it on the main page as possible (i.e. having one bland article in 5 noms wasn't so bad), and we had some wizards at making even the blandest articles have an interesting hook -- Samir 03:42, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds pretty much like what most of us do now. From what I can tell, we rarely reject a nomination outright just because it's not interesting...rather, we squeeze out whatever semi-special fact we can and then sneak it onto the main page, when possible, as long as the article itself meets all the standards. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 03:53, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Further, I'd say about a third of the time, one of the DYK reviewers either revises the article, the hook, or both to help get the article onto the Main Page. On some of them, we really struggle, but seem to come up with something before time runs out. -- Suntag ☼ 18:38, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just about all noms posted on the suggestion page are used. If there is no shortage of nominations, and eliminating the DYK awards will not affect the amount of noms, I don't see how "awarding editors for producing a profuse number of DYKs" can be said to tend to compromise the entire section on the front page by an overabundance of very bland hooks. -- Suntag ☼ 18:32, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think we're backlogged

35 hooks in Expiring right now. And the vast majority of hooks above there haven't been looked at. I thought about putting a 35 entries in backlog as of 04:41, 18 December 2008 (UTC) like Gatoclass did during the last major backlog, but I figured I should at least bring it up here first. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 04:41, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

35 is not too bad, are the updates still being posted regularly? If it gets to 50 we might have to think about shortening the time cycle again. Gatoclass (talk) 04:48, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The updates seem to be ok now, but when I started populating Next a few minutes ago (I only added a few; I'm not going to do the whole thing, for reasons that will be apparent in a moment) there were hardly any verified noms left to take. The few verified noms left near the bottom are ones I just verified a minute ago, so someone other than me should promote those....and there are a few more verified noms among the more recent ones, but other than that it's just days and days of noms that haven't been checked, so within a couple updates there won't be anything left to put in the queue (unless we verify a bunch really fast...I might be able to do a bunch tomorrow morning but no guarantees. Shortening the time cycle would worsen that for now, since we'd run out of verified noms even faster....but if we both shorten up the time cycle and ramp up our verifying efforts (assuming we're not already busy in the real world...) we could probably put a good dent in the noms. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 04:55, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There's nothing to stop you promoting hooks you verify! I do it all the time - couldn't prepare decent updates without it. The only rule we have is that users can't verify their own hooks, there is nothing to stop you promoting them once verified.

BTW I have counted the total number of hooks and it's around 160, which means there are slightly less hooks now than when we came off the six hour cycles a couple of weeks ago. So we seem to be keeping up okay. Gatoclass (talk) 05:01, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There is certainly a shortage of verified hooks, particularly expiring nominations. But we have two batches done, and less than eight verifications in twelve hours is achievable. That being said, it would be great to get it back to having all five queues full and a next update in the works. \ / (⁂ | ※) 10:39, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For most of my time on DYK, it has usually been a matter of throwing together an update at the last moment from whatever is available, which often wasn't much. In fact I have frequently prepared last-minute updates where I had to verify virtually every hook myself on the fly, because there were none on the Suggestions page! And now here we have people worrying because we've only got two updates in the slot and "a shortage of verified hooks". I have to keep pinching myself to believe this is really happening :) Gatoclass (talk) 16:27, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Haha, wow, it sounds like I've been quite spoiled since I started at DYK. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:52, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Queue 4

In the hook about the Laogai Museum in T:DYK/Q4, I believe the word laogai (the second time it appears) should be italicized. I don't see an edit summary in T:DYK/N saying why the italicization was removed (ie, I don't know if there's a particular MoS or DYK issue behind that), but as a foreign term my intuition was to put it in italics. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:52, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

According to Wikipedia:ITALICS#Foreign_terms: "If looking for a good rule of thumb, do not italicize words that appear in Merriam-Webster Online". And the word appears here. However, it is just a good rule of thumb, and I'd like to hear others' opinions. --BorgQueen (talk) 16:57, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, ok, I hadn't seen that. It is true that the term has been adopted into numerous dictionaries (the OED, as well as leading dictionaries of German, French, and Italian). I don't know how familiar it is to most people, though; its adoption into those dictionaries seems to have been more politically than linguistically motivated. But either way is fine with me. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:51, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another rule of thumb is this Google Books search, which shows "laogai" italicized about 40% of the time. Art LaPella (talk) 17:54, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Template getting updated

Just in case anyone hasn't been following, there has been a discussion above about improving the current template to auto-generate DYKmake and DYKnom credit templates, so the person promoting the nom to Next can just copy them in (with the idea that this will remove some of the human error that may have been going on occasionally). You can read the discussion above, or experiment with the new template design at User:Politizer/Sandbox (you can experiment by using {{User:Politizer/DYKsugdev}}, which is the dev version of {{DYKsug}}). I will be updating the real template with these changes, within 24 hours, unless someone has objections to the new version. I will also notify all the DYK regulars (especially those of you who do most of the grunt work moving hooks to Next) when I make the update. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:49, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, just took a look at the sandbox, and the examples with multiple entries don't seem to have outputted any code at all. Is that a bug you've yet to address?

Also, I am uneasy about the "collaborator" tag. IMO this will incline people to assume that anyone who made a couple of improvements is a "collaborator". We don't want to be handing out DYK awards willy-nilly. I would suggest just using "creator2", "creator3" etc., it's less liable to be misinterpreted. Gatoclass (talk) 06:17, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the link I gave you was accidentally to the sandbox before I made those changes; in this version, the examples with multiple entries output Credits must be done manually by a DYK reviewer.

As for changing the parameter name, I agree with that idea, and can change that relatively easily; creator2, etc., will be more intuitive. The only thing I have left to do is make it not create a {{DYKnom}} when people do self noms...a lot of people list themself as both creator/expander and nominator. Once I have that done I think it should be ready. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:27, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done Both of those tasks are done now. You can see the goods here. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:46, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just nominated Early left anterior negativity using the new template, and I noticed that I had made the credit templates bass-ackwards...it was {{DYKmake|Politizer|Early left anterior negativity}} instead of {{DYKmake|Early left anterior negativity|Politizer}}. That is fixed now. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:02, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

TonyTheTiger just nom'ed Barack Obama 2009 presidential inauguration and the credit template came out fine. I'll keep my eye open for more complicated noms to start rolling in, and try to make sure that they do the templates correctly as well. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:32, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Page Count Stats

I noticed the discussion above about the page count tool not working. I checked Henrik's page, and he hasn't posted a contribution in a couple weeks. As BorgQueen mentioned, a similar issue resulted in the loss of all data for the last half of July. If anyone here knows of anyone who has the ability to make sure the data isn't lost before Henrik's return, that would be good. Cbl62 (talk) 23:02, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Has anyone e-mailed Henrik? —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 00:13, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was coming to this discussion page to bring up the very same topic about the stats tool being down, too. I just emailed Henrik about it, so hopefully he's at least aware of it even though he's been inactive on Wikipedia recently. I could have missed a comment about this somewhere, but is there possibly another stats tool that we could use which works similarily? Jamie^☆S93 04:07, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not that I'm aware of. Henrik's tool is really invaluable, and there ought to be a way to have someone "fill in" when he is away (or to automate the process) so that we don't end up with big gaps with missing data (like we had in July). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cbl62 (talk • contribs) 04:45, 19 December 2008 UTC (UTC)

Raw data is still available, I believe. Does anyone know how to process it? --BorgQueen (talk) 05:29, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The stats tool seems to be pretty highly regarded, as it's been incorporated into wikipedia's history pages now. So if it's down, maybe one of the techies would be interested in trying to fix it. Gatoclass (talk) 06:09, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey everyone, I just went and created a template for suggesting alternate DYK hooks, I have noticed while moving approved hooks to the next update, that some users have been using the {{DYKsug}} template to create alts, and that templaet adds a whole bunch of extra code to the page that is not needed for alts but is needed for the initial suggestion. And, all the extra code makes it harder to find the approved hook when moving hooks to the next update, so to fix this problem, I went and created {{DYKalt}} which has only the parameters that are needed to suggest DYK alts :), the template responds to the following parameters:

{{DYKalt
 | number            = Number of the ALT hook, defaults to 1
 | hook              = Suggested Alternate hook
 | user              = Your username (The user who suggested the alt hook)
 }}

So this:

{{DYKalt|number=2|hook=Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat?|user=Mifter}}

Would produce this

Template:DYKalt

Thoughts? I'm thinking that we should have an admin add the usage of this template to the Editnotice for T:TDYK, but before asking an admin to do that I wanted to make sure everyone was on board with us starting to use this template :). Thanks and All the Best, --Mifter (talk) 17:05, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see anything wrong with this, other than the possibility of confusing people by having yet another template (I've created a monster!!!). But given that most of the alt suggesting is done by regulars, I think regulars can figure things out after a couple days...I'm not sure if it would be necessary to have it in the edit notice, though, just because the edit notice is already quite large and the instructions for {{DYKsug}} in the editnotice still leave a lot to be desired (which means the edit notice will probably continue to get larger until those instructions are good enough). Actually, I personally am not totally convinced we need the table of DYKtick icons in the edit notice, but I dunno, maybe they are useful for other people—personally, I know them just by habit, but are a lot of you other guys still using that table in the edit notice for copying and pasting? —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:17, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I copy from the table of DYKtick icons all the time. I reduced it to two lines at Template:DYKSymbols by keeping the symbols, codes, and the {{subst:DYKproblem|Article}} string and getting rid of the rest. My challege to you, my good friend Politizer, is to reduce the vertical height of Template:DYKsugstrings. : ) -- Suntag ☼ 18:49, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thankyou Mifter for the suggestion, but I really can't see the point of this. It's easier to just write your own DYK hook than go to the trouble of formatting it this way. And unlike DYKsug, this is not producing output that helps speed the DYK process. Given that this will also have to be documented at the top of the page, it just looks like a case of instruction creep to me. Gatoclass (talk) 06:13, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is not a matter of a better template for the alts, people should not be using any template for the alts since there really is no need. {{DYKalt}} doesn't seem address the original problem, that of people using the {{DYKsug}} template to create alts. If people think they need to or should use a template to create the alts, I think we'll end up with people using {{DYKalt}} and the {{DYKsug}} template to create alts, which brings us back to the original problem. -- Suntag ☼ 13:21, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. There isn't any real use for a template for alt hooks. Only thing it does is present it in the same way that the user would, nothing much of a help and only increases the work the user has to do I think. Chamal ^talk 13:26, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Valery Kobelev

Valery Kobelev passed the criterias for DYK and was removed from the DYK list. Where is it now?? The Rolling Camel (talk) 17:20, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

~~Here. --BorgQueen (talk) 17:22, 19 December 2008 (UTC)~~[reply]

Actually, that hook is inaccurate; I probably should have pointed that out the first time I commented on the nom. According to the article, he didn't "perform the worst ski crash ever," but performed what one person has called one of the worst ski crashes ever. I think we need to either change the hook to reflect that, or take it out of the queue and put it back on T:TDYK for discussion (if that hook is unsalvageably peacocky). —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:31, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done. It is here now. --BorgQueen (talk) 17:36, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mitsuyasu Maeno hook in Queue 4

There is a typo in T:DYK/Q4: "Japanesese" instead of "Japanese" (that one is my bad). Also, the nominator asked me if we could restore "ultra-nationalist" to the description of the guy targeted in the kamikaze attack (replacing "multi-millionare Yoshio Kodama" with "multi-millionaire and ultra-nationalists leader Yoshio Kodama")—I personally don't have a preference for either one over the other. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 20:34, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done. --BorgQueen (talk) 20:36, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh man, it looks like I just made another typo (which is now in the queue, where I can't fix it): "ultra-nationalists" instead of "ultra-nationalist." Sorry! —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 20:38, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed it. (Occasionally this mop comes in quite handy.) - Dravecky (talk) 21:45, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion for Christmas 2009

I wish I'd had this idea a week ago when there might have been enough time to pull it off for 2008 but given a year to do research it's completely possible: a single themed queue for Santa's reindeer. There are articles that need creating or expanding at HMS Dasher, Dancer (1991 film), Prancer (film), Vixen, Comet (disambiguation), Cupid (disambiguation), Donner, and Blitzen. Heck, Nils Rudolph could use serious expansion, too. Just something to consider and I needed to write it down now or the idea would be lost for good. - Dravecky (talk) 09:39, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Long title, piping

I have a long titled article: Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs. Was wondering if it would be alright to pipe it in some obvious way, such as a statement or a speech, or something like that, for my hook. Thoughts?

"...that a 1969 policy statement by Richard Nixon", etc? Shimgray | talk | 10:38, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, something like that. --IvoShandor (talk) 10:41, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, that's been done a lot before, I think it should be fine. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:23, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it should be alright as long as the hook isn't easter eggish, and it's clearly indicating what the general subject is about (i.e., if it's scientific, where something occured, etc). Piping that type of link, though, typically makes the hook more readable/interesting if you can cut down and summarize a long article title. Jamie^☆S93 15:34, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just used Shimgray's example above, easter eggish was my main concern, it never used to be much of a problem but I had noticed the occasional talk page discussion about it so I just wante dto give a heads up here first. The hook and several alts are now on the suggestion page, thanks for the input. --IvoShandor (talk) 15:39, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Expiring nom needs reviewed

Can someone take a look at this nom? It's been here over 10 days now; I've had misgivings because it uses a single source, but the single source does appear to be pretty reliable, so I'm not totally sure what to do with it, and have been waiting for a second opinion. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:27, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

After the holidays...

I just significantly expanded vascular myelopathy and was about to nominate it for DYK when I noticed only articles relevent to the holidays are being accepted for now. This has kind of bugged me. Are articles not relevent to the holidays created during the holidays going to be acceptable after the holidays for nomination? I'd like this article to feature in DYK but for the meanwhile it can't. —Cyclonenim (talk · contribs · email) 16:28, 21 December 2008 (UTC) ^{P.S. Sorry for the amount of times I've said the word 'holiday'...}[reply]

There's a special list of ones to be featured "seasonally" (as it were), but there's no limitation on normal content - just add it as usual under the relevant date. Shimgray | talk | 16:49, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Crap... my mistake there. Cheers, done now. —Cyclonenim (talk · contribs · email) 17:09, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

DYK page view data is back -- Big spider scores

Well Henrik's page view counter is back, and of all the great hooks in the past week, the biggest score goes to the Giant huntsman spider with 29,300 DYK views. It now ranks among the all-time best.

Article (DYK date)	Image	DYK views	DYK hook	Nominator
Giant huntsman spider (Dec. 19, 2008)		29,300	... that with a leg-span of 30 centimetres (12 inches), the giant huntsman (pictured) is one of the world's largest spiders?	Bender235 DarkAvenger

Ah, the tool is back - nice! :-) Well, I'm not sure if it's been done already, but if you all need a hand with gathering information of the top-viewed hooks over the past week or so, feel free to leave me a ping and I'd be happy to go through the archives and help look up the hooks through the view counter tool in case there's some data that hasn't been recorded at WP:DYKBEST. Jamie^☆S93 04:12, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Glad to see the tool back and... dang, it looks like Man v. Food only cracked the 4900 mark and I had such hopes for that one. - Dravecky (talk) 04:49, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The spider got 29,300 views? That's surprising. OTOH, maybe world record topics bring in the crowds. I'm really liking this tool. This is the second spider article receiving more than 20,000 hits, the first being La Princesse (the mechanicl spider). I think the Main Page hits count is interesting enough to have a regular column at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost. Also, we should look into having a redundancy feature so that if the first version goes down, the second picks up. -- Suntag ☼ 14:35, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If we can get the system to regularly generate data on the in-the-news and this-day segments as well, it'd be *really* interesting - this-day has a fairly broad range of topics too, so is quite comparable. Shimgray | talk | 16:31, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Inline citations and redundant footnotes

After reading the discussion about the hook for Yes-no question, I think it's worthwhile to gauge consensus on the balance between requiring inline citations vs encouraging redundant footnotes. By redundant footnotes I mean a situation where you have consecutive sentences all sourced to the same reference with a repetitive use of the same footnote. (Like this example) Looking at guidelines like WP:Footnotes and Wikipedia:Citing_sources#How_to_present_citations, having a single footnote at the end of a paragraph is clearly an acceptable practice. While no one has the omniscience to know what every reader will think, logic generally dictates that a solitary footnote at the end of the paragraph is the sourced used for the entire paragraph. If there are multiple footnotes then it would stand to reason that the text prior to the footnote, but after the earlier footnote, is what's being sourced.
As a reviewer myself, I am obviously a huge supporter of requiring inline citations for verifying hooks but I don't see any substantial benefit in requiring redundant footnotes. Sometimes a hook utilizes information from multiple lines of text in the paragraph (or article). If consecutive lines of text are sourced to the same footnote, it doesn't aid the reader (or the reviewer) to have consecutive appearances of^[1] the^[1] same^[1] footnote.^[1] If a reviewer can not clearly tell where the reference citation is, I think it is fair to ask for clarification from the nominator. But once clarification is given and verification is complete I think it is rather silly to go ahead and still require a redundant footnote. That's what concerns me with the discussion on the Yes-no question hook. The whole purpose of verifying hooks is to avoid embarrassing error report at WP:ERRORS and inaccurate information on the mainpage. If the hook is verified to a cited reference and there is no disputing facts, then why not let the article appear on DYK? Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 06:04, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If the purpose of a reference right after the hook sentence is only to make it easier to verify it for Did You Know and not as a permanent record, then the rule should be that the reference should either be immediately after the article's hook sentence (as now), or else the reference should be with the hook at Template talk:Did you know. This could be done with a new Reference field in DYKsug. Art LaPella (talk) 06:32, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's a great idea Art. I think most nominators wouldn't have a problem noting what the references for their hook are. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 06:36, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds good. It would only require a small change and would bring benefits in potentially tricky situations. Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 08:49, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See Template_talk:DYKsuggestion/Archive_1#Hookref. The basis for requiring inline citations in hooks is at DYK selection criteria. Also, is this really a problem? People generally understand the need to allow the 3,000,000+ readers of the Main Page to confirm the hook and it is rare that anyone objects to inline citing of the hook fact. Few hook use information from multiple lines of text in a paragraph or article. Rather, most hooks use actual language from the article and additionally provide an inline citation to that language. In the Yes-no question DYK suggestion example, there was no redundant footnote request. That original hook was not verified to a cited reference and the inline citation request by Politizer was an effort to develope an alternate hook since the original hook is not worded well. Sometimes its better to try to initially work with a user on the DYK suggestion page through discussion rather than come out initially and post an objection to the suggested hook. Politizer took the right approach. -- Suntag ☼ 14:30, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(outdent) In the yes-no question discussion, I would have made that recommendation whether or not this was DYK. As I pointed out in the discussion, I can't tell in that instance whether a paragraph with one footnote at the end is supposed to mean X^[1] Y^[1] Z^[1] etc.^[1] , or whether it's supposed to mean X^{[citation needed]} Y^{[citation needed]} Z^{[citation needed]} etc.^[1] I don't require repeating refs when multiple sentences flow into one another (for example, when multiple sentences are following the same stream of logic, reporting the results of an experiment, explaining a fact, etc.), but when three sentences contain three facts that could in theory have come from anywhere, I use three references. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 12:54, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The usual method is to add a cite at the end of the paragraph to cover the whole thing, and then add citations for individual facts that are likely to be challenged. If the fact is not something that is likely to send people thinking "what the hell?" and it'd backed by the reference at the end of the paragraph, it's not necessary to cite that individually. But the thing here is, some DYK articles don't have a good structure, some don't even have sections. So in something like that it's hard to find where the ref is for a particular piece of information isn't it? So better to have the ref right next to the hook fact I think. It'd be great if we can have the ref linked from the suggestions page itself, as Art suggested. Chamal ^talk 13:33, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I generally agree that citations should not need to be repeated if they are provided in a logical place, which generally means at the end of the paragraph (or at the end of the sentence that introduces a list or quotation). However, after a variety of experiences here (notably after an article that I created was eviscerated by a righteous Wikipedian who deleted every insignificant factual item that was not supported by its own independent footnote), I reached the conclusion that in Wikipedia (where subsequent contributors may add or delete content without respecting the relationship between existing content and associated references) it's often better to include extra citations for traceability. Extra citations are not nearly as bad as unverifiable content. --Orlady (talk) 00:54, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with the idea of adding footnotes to DYKsug, it will just complicate things further. In regards to the general question, I think cites need to be as close to the relevant fact as possible, otherwise one really doesn't know whether the cite refers to that particular fact. This can mean redundant cites but users can always delete a cite they think is redundant after the article has had its time on the front page. Gatoclass (talk) 17:32, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If we're already expecting nominators to submit a hook that they've made sure is referenced, where is the extra work or complication is simply noting what reference is being used? Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 18:04, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I still don't see what is the benefit of encouraging redundant footnotes if the material is already referenced and cited with a footnote? (Note that I'm working from a good faith assumption that the material used for the hook is, indeed, cited with a footnote in the article just maybe not every line with redundant footnotes) Does poor readability and bad style do anything to increase a reader's faith in Wikipedia? If we are assuming that each of the 3,000,000+ readers of the main page desire to be able to check the sources for every hook featured on DYK, can we not also assume they have the common sense to look at the footnote at the end of the paragraph that the hook is from? One statement jumped out at me, when Suntag states "Few hook use information from multiple lines of text in a paragraph or article." I know that its been a few months since I've been actively reviewing but if this statement is true then that will go a long way towards explaining the dilution in quality of hooks at DYK. Some of the best, most eye catching and informative hooks usually come from utilizing multiple aspects of the article and may be referenced by multiple footnotes. While we should stay vigilant in requiring that the hook material be referenced to an in-line citation, this culture that wants the hook to be drilled down to an EXACT single line from the article with a single footnote is cutting our noses off to spite our faces. And for whose benefit? The 3,000,000+ readers of the main page? The content creators? Or the reviewers? As a reviewer, I would concede that it is easier to "Control-F" to search for the exact wording of the hook and then tick off that there is a little blue footnote immediately next to it. But what is easier for the reviewer, is not necessarily in the best interest of the groups that DYK is designed to served--the readers and the project as a whole. We should be encouraging better habits, better hooks and better articles for the benefit of all. It is infinitely possible to maintain our standards of verification without handcuffing the nominators to dumb down their hook to an exact line from the article or to mandate redundant footnotes. Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 18:04, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's not always possible to have a single cite for a hook, because hooks often contain more than one fact that needs to be cited. However, regardless of whether the hook needs one cite or more than one, it's best to have the hook cited as closely as possible to the relevant fact or facts. If that isn't done, reviewers are in the dark as to whether the hook actually has a valid cite or not.

Now for someone like you Agne, who likes to cite things at the end of a paragraph, and who knows the rules well, I might make an exception, but one cannot operate from the assumption that every user who gives a cite at the end of a paragraph intends it to be a cite for the hook fact. I know from experience that many users completely forget to add a cite, or else when they do add a cite, it turns out that it's not actually a cite at all. That's why we need rules about these things. Gatoclass (talk) 18:12, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The reviewers don't have to be in the dark. If the reference citation is not immediately clear, they can always seek clarification and the nominator can respond in kind. This is actually not a new idea since we've been doing this for quite a while now. But the question then is, after the nominator has responded and clarified the referencing--allowing the hook to be verified by the reviewer--are we still going to mandate a redundant footnote in order for it to be featured? Agne ^Cheese/^Wine 18:23, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Like Agne, I much prefer hooks that don't derive directly from the words in the article, and that may require multiple sources. However, complex hooks are harder to verify, particularly when they are based on unusually long articles (a couple of weeks ago I reviewed a couple of candidate hooks that were based on a 128K article, and the review was a time-consuming job). When nominating a complex hook, it would be helpful to include a comment to tell the reviewers where in the article to look for the hook fact and sources. --Orlady (talk) 00:54, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This may be a little late for me to be posting this, but anyway, in response to Art's suggestion that we include a |reference= field in the DYKsug template.... Suntag did float that idea a while back, but we never pursued it, and I wasn't a huge fan of it. I may be more hardline than most other reviewers here about citation, but my way of thinking is, we want the referencing style in the article to be as clear as possible, and in a perfect world we wouldn't need nominators to tell us where the citation is because in a perfect world that would be obvious just from reading the article. (And most WP readers will read only the article, not T:TDYK...and those are the people we're serving, anyway.) My worry was that adding such a field to the template might just encourage nominators to get lazy about referencing in the actual article. That is probably paranoia on my part, but anyway, that was my take on that issue. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 05:57, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just to reiterate, I see no need to relax the rules on this. It's all very well for Agne to talk about reviewers "seeking clarification" from nominators, but we shouldn't need to do so. Nor should hook facts be buried in articles in such a way that determination is difficult. Time is very much of the essence here, it's already a very time-consuming job trying to verify hooks, and expecting reviewers to plough through reams of text, or contact users when they shouldn't have to, is simply unreasonable. Gatoclass (talk) 07:02, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I must be still missing something here. If the reference after the hook sentence rule is for "most WP readers [who] will read only the article, not T:TDYK...and those are the people we're serving, anyway", then the article's hook sentence should be treated the same as all the other sentences, since these readers haven't even read the hook. Or if the rule is because "expecting reviewers to plough through reams of text, or contact users when they shouldn't have to, is simply unreasonable", then including the reference(s) with the hook would relieve that very burden on the reviewer. The only people who benefit from requiring a reference after the hook sentence (and only the hook sentence) are readers who see the hook, and respond by clicking the article, finding the hook in the article, and clicking the reference to decide if they want to believe the hook. If that is a frequent occurrence, then that is the only reason for the present rule. Yes, a reference(s) with the hook (with or without a new DYKsug field) is an added complication, but at least it's more user-friendly than expecting them to add a reference and then counter-intuitively delete it after the DYK period. Art LaPella (talk) 18:57, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I usually don't think of this as a DYK-specific thing (which is why I get a funny taste in my mouth when I hear talk of people adding an extra footnote just for DYK and then removing it once it goes off the main page), but as a general style thing that every article should have and that DYK happens to enforce—just like no bare URLs in refs (that's a random example but I think it's relatively parallel). In any article, every fact should have a reference reasonably close to it (no one doubts that; what we're debating here, I think, is how close and how often is "reasonable"), and DYK happens to require that that general guideline is met before a hook is featured. At least, that has been my understanding of things since I started here. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 19:16, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I do think of this as a DYK-specific thing. The rules state: "The hook fact must have an inline citation right after it since the fact is an extraordinary claim; citing the hook fact at the end of the paragraph is not acceptable." I have never read that every sentence in the whole article needs such a reference; only the sentence that verifies the hook. And I believe that is the DYK-specific rule that this discussion is about, not the additional rule that the article in general needs some references. Art LaPella (talk) 20:02, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is a DYK-specific thing we are discussing here - the DYK requirements regarding the hook are a separate issue from the normal Wikipedia policies and guidelines concerning referencing. What we are basically looking for is confirmation that the hook statement itself is accurate. The second issue is that the confirmation should be as transparent as possible, so that reviewers can quickly confirm hooks. I know I probably sounded a little blunt in my previous post on this thread, but really, I can't stress this enough - I have sometimes spent considerable time trying to confirm hooks because users didn't reference the hook clearly enough, and that is time that could obviously be spent doing something more useful. It can take a long time to put an update together if you get several poorly referenced hooks in a row.

As for Art's suggestion that refs are put directly on the Suggestions page, I'm not keen on this idea, even though I've sometimes done it myself, because our other requirement is that the hook statement actually appears in the article, so the article has to be checked anyway and it may make the statement harder to find if it isn't flagged with an accompanying cite. Gatoclass (talk) 05:27, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Typo alert

Plz could an administrator correct a typo I've just spotted in the pictured hook (the squirrel monkeys) in Queue 4: "fragemented" → "fragmented". Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 08:49, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done. --BorgQueen (talk) 08:53, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks BQ! Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 09:02, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

DYK hook having 9-articles

Congrats to Doug Coldwell for his 9 article DYK hook. I guess that would be the present record? -- Suntag ☼ 13:42, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, what is the record so that I can promptly smash it?--293.xx.xxx.xx (talk) 15:12, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I created DYK hooks with 5 or more DYK articles to keep track of this. If you know of other hooks that had 5 or more DYK articles, please add them to "DYK hooks with 5 or more DYK articles". -- Suntag ☼ 23:00, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Length of the hook question

Do the ellipses (...) and the space between them and the word "that" count towards the length of the hook? I sort of assume that they do but would like to make sure. Thanks, Nsk92 (talk) 14:00, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm... I count "that" and the question mark at the end, but not the "..." Chamal ^talk 14:04, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Either way, I think some sort of clarification is needed. The reason I asked is that I was looking at a proposed DYK hook whose length, counted from "that", was 200 characters (the official limit), and whose length when counted from "..." was 204. I was contemplating whether to try to shorten it by 4 characters or leave it as is. Nsk92 (talk) 14:19, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

And what about (pictured) – does that count towards the length of the hook? I've always included it because I feel it consumes space on the Main Page. --Bruce1ee^talk 15:07, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I would count (pictured) too and in fact I thought that (...) should be counted for exactly the same reason. Nsk92 (talk) 15:35, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My practice has been to count (pictured) and the question mark but not the ellipsis. Cbl62 (talk) 16:05, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't count the ellipsis and I usually count the "(pictured)" but I do think it's a little unfair to count the latter. Gatoclass (talk) 17:36, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User:Art LaPella/Long hook says "For what it's worth, I don't count the "..." but I do count the "?"." I also count "pictured" just because hook length enforcement is such a repetitive, un-automated task. I haven't tried to settle the question with an Unwritten Rule because I thought arguing over 204 characters or 200 defeats the purpose of the word "about" in "about 200 characters". But the current consensus might be better reflected by removing that word "about". Art LaPella (talk) 18:26, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thanks. Nsk92 (talk) 20:17, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Backlog

User:YellowMonkey says on my talk page that we have a backlog. Could anyone confirm? --BorgQueen (talk) 01:24, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Um, not exactly. Queues 3, 4, and 5 are all empty... Cirt (talk) 01:27, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

On the DYKT, I think so. That's why I economised the hooks and then added one to each of the queues. And will pad the SA to balance, of course. YellowMonkey (bananabucket) 02:33, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If we indeed have a backlog, we can adjust update cycle rather than lengthening the entire main page. --BorgQueen (talk) 02:38, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The problem isn't that there is too many, it is that we aren't verifying them quickly enough. Old hooks get left unverified well into their expiry, while the queues aren't being used to their full capacity. » \ / (⁂ | ※) 02:50, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, per YellowMonkey's concern, I've shortened the cycle to 5 hours. Let me know if anyone has objections. --BorgQueen (talk) 03:55, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There's only 172 hooks total on the Suggestions page, including the Christmas and New Year hooks. So we are actually eating into our hooks again, with only 146 hooks in the main section as opposed to over 170 a few days ago - and many of the current hooks have been challenged. So I see no need at all to accelerate the cycle. Gatoclass (talk) 06:30, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Granted, I've been out of the loop all day so you should take this with a grain of salt, but AFAIK we have very few verified hooks (I assume 50% because a lot of us are busy and 50% because the events of the past week or two made it not so enjoyable to edit here for a while, for me at least but maybe also for others, which greatly reduced the amount of time I was devoting to checking hooks), and speeding up the updates might make us run out even faster. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 06:37, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

On the other hand, I notice the queue is full so there won't be any more going to the queue for a day or so, but all the same, I don't see much reason to panic yet. We'll have a better idea of where we are at after the Christmas break when all the special hooks are out of the way, that might be a better time to think about boosting the cycle IMO. Gatoclass (talk) 06:43, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comments. I've reverted it back to six hours. --BorgQueen (talk) 08:58, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I definitely had set the timer on 5 hours and I see the latest update was done after 5 hours and 50 minutes. Did someone do something to delay the bot or was it some sort of divine intervention?! --BorgQueen (talk) 09:22, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I was kind of hoping my sixfer hook would not be prematurely relegated so maybe someone was listening :) Gatoclass (talk) 09:33, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We're live!

The number of 'Did You Know' hooks currently found in the DYK pipeline is stored here and updated every 30 minutes. Here's the output:

Section	# of Hooks	# Verified
Count of DYK Hooks
May 30	1
June 2	1
June 3	1
June 7	1
June 8	1
June 9	1
June 10	1	1
June 13	1
June 14	1
June 15	2
June 17	2
June 19	1
June 20	1	1
June 21	3	2
June 22	2
June 23	3
June 24	2
June 25	1	1
June 26	7	1
June 27	1
June 28	5	2
June 29	3	3
June 30	2	1
July 1	7	5
July 2	4	4
July 3	8	5
July 4	7	4
July 5	6	3
July 6	9	8
July 7	7	5
July 8	9	6
July 9	7	5
July 10	10	8
July 11	7	3
July 12	7	5
July 13	12	4
July 14	11	5
July 15	8	4
July 16	12	11
July 17	11	6
July 18	8	5
July 19	14	8
July 20	6	5
July 21	10	4
July 22	11	6
July 23	7	3
July 24	4
July 25	10
July 26	3
July 27	3
July 28	2
Total	264	134
Last updated 06:26, 28 July 2024 UTC Current time is 06:56, 28 July 2024 UTC [refresh]

The timing of the update is controlled at User:WikiStatsBOT/DYKdelay. I just requested that the bot be revised to reflect the number of verified hooks, so that column is empty. If there is some other modification that you think the table should have, please post here. Thanks. -- Suntag ☼ 18:56, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sweet! Is this going to be included in the navbox, or transcluded somewhere prominent?

As for having the bot count verified hooks, I agree that that would be awesome, but it might also get a little complicated...for one thing, some hooks occasionally get multiple

or

(for example, sometimes i get into an EC with someone else verifying and after that i'm like, "ah, screw it, I reviewed it too, so I'll tick it too"...other times someone ticks one of the hooks and someone else ticks an ALT or something)...and, on the other hand, sometimes a hook gets ticked but then people change their minds or start arguing about it, but the tick remains there. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to get the bot to be able to think around all that stuff...it might just be easier to have a disclaimer saying "these numbers might be off by a couple." —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 19:23, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh, I like this; hook-verifying activity can be prioritised more clearly and backlogs can be seen before they arrive. This might give me the necessary kick in the behind to get on and do some verifying like I keep meaning to! Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 19:57, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Very impressive tool. Dare I ask -- is there a way we could automate the Best of DYK? To date, BorgQueen and I have been doing it manually, inputting each DYK hook into Henrik's page view counter to see how many hits it got. It's a pretty time-consuming process to do that for roughly 1,000 hooks a month. If the task could be automated, that would be a tremendous time saver. Perhaps a trained bot could even go back through the old archives to check the months of DYK's that BorgQueen and I haven't gotten to yet. Cbl62 (talk) 21:16, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nice, I think this'll be very helpful! Thanks a lot for your work guys. :-) Jamie^☆S93 21:31, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Great work Suntag! I can't pretend it's been fun adding up all the hooks as I've have to do on a number of occasions lately :)

A couple of suggested improvements however - would it be possible to add a column or two for challenged or rejected hooks - and maybe some extra totals taking these into account? I don't know how you could reliably do this - but then again I'm not sure how you can reliably count the verified hooks either, so it might be possible.

Also, I think it might be useful to have some sort of history where the totals are stored, to see how the number of hooks is trending over time. Gatoclass (talk) 04:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I am the one who actually programmed the bot, so perhaps I am bet suited to answer the questions posed here.

To get the number verified the bot simply counts the # of checks. Yes this is not 100% accurate, but it should be accurate enough. The idea is the give people a quick idea of what needs worked on, so the verified number occasionally being 1-2 high shouldn't matter.
Yes, I could add whatever other stats desired as long as there is a clearly defined way to count them. However, keep in min the table will be transluded to one or more pages and a bigger table might mess up formatting if its put to the right of a TOC or similar. The extra info may or may not be worth making the table bulkier.
What did you have in mind for "some sort of history"? Of course, the complete history is already available in the stat page's history, so what were you desiring?
The "Best of DYK" could probably be completely automated, but I'll need more information on the precise process you'd want the bot to follow.

--ThaddeusB (talk) 02:35, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, the Bot's trial period is complete so the next update won't occur until after it gains official approval (shouldn't take long). --ThaddeusB (talk) 15:29, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Grammar in Queue 3

The Pennsylvania Route 343 hook in Queue 3 could do with rewording, as it's ungrammatical at the moment. Perhaps "... that Pennsylvania Route 343 is part of the ..."? Thx in advance. Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 08:43, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Gatoclass (talk) 09:25, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Procopio

The Procopio article is a pretty thoroughly researched piece on California history. It's currently in queue 5 set to hit the main page from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. California time. It would be nice if it could be switched to a queue where it would hit the Main Page while Californians are awake. I wouldn't normally ask, but this article took a lot of time to prepare. Cbl62 (talk) 13:18, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've moved it to #1. Let's hope they wake up early in California. :-D --BorgQueen (talk) 16:08, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, BorgQueen. Cbl62 (talk) 16:42, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Update late

Are any admins watching this page right now? The update is about 30 minutes late...maybe something happened when BorgQueen and Gatoclass were changing the bot's update intervals? —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 13:19, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've been watching, and just updated manually. I don't think it has anything to do with the timer template (which is the only thing I altered and then reverted), but only the bot creator could come up with a good answer. --BorgQueen (talk) 13:25, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Btw, could someone do the credits please? It is the queue 2. --BorgQueen (talk) 13:31, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm on it! —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:08, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Credits done, the queue can be emptied now. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:14, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, you are an angel. --BorgQueen (talk) 14:25, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just doing what I can to pad my contribs ;). —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:34, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Now's the time to ask BorgQueen to assign you to a good job. Once Wikipedia contains the sum of all human knowledge, it may be revealed that Wikipedia is nothing more than a tool the Borg and all earth individuals and technology, including Wikipedia, will be transformed into Borg. At that time, we'll all be scrambling for decent jobs in the collective. Personally, I don't want to end up in Sanitation duty, if you know what I mean. I wouldn't mind food preparation, however. -- Suntag ☼ 18:19, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

DYK articles that make GA/FA

Suntag and I just thought about the idea of keeping a list of DYK articles that go on to make GA or FA (while keeping our fingers crossed that the result doesn't look embarrassing), and to facilitate keeping track of that Suntag suggested adding |FA= and |GA= parameters to the {{DYKtalk}} template that goes on DYK articles' talk pages...it defaults to "no," but if an article gets promoted you can set it to "yes" and then it shows up in Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are featured articles or Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are good articles). I've written code to add those parameters to the template, but since the template is protected I can't update it; the code is at User:Politizer/Dyktalk if any of you admins want to double-check it and then paste it into Template:Dyktalk—that is, of course, if you guys all think this is an idea worth pursuing.

(Suntag has put in a bot request here for a bot to go through and update those templates in existing DYK articles.) —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:28, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Further on the above. The |FA= and |GA= won't change how we presently do things. I don't anticipate anyone in the future actually filling in the |FA= and |GA= for {{DYKtalk}}. Every few months or so, we'll just have the bot run an update. When compared to the overall contributions in Category:Wikipedia good articles and Category:Wikipedia featured articles, the new DYK categories will give DYK some feed back on DYKs part in the GA and FA process. In sum, there's nothing for anyone to do but enjoy the gravy. -- Suntag ☼ 18:04, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Cool. What a good stream of innovations today! One question to sneak in at this point: could Featured Lists be included as well? Lists with lots of prose in the lead or elsewhere sometimes get featured at DYK, and could in theory be nominated at WP:FL... (and yes, I admit I'm thinking of one of my self-noms which will be presented at FL if I ever get round to it...!!) Hassocks5489 (tickets please!) 19:55, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why not, as long as it was once in DYK and is now featured. I can just change name of the |FA= parameter to |FC= parameter, to clarify that other kinds of featured content are acceptable as well. (Within reason, of course—I think we can safely assume that no feature images were ever had a hook taken from them and put on DYK.) —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 20:24, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Umm, I can see a problem adding with parameters to {{DYKtalk}}, namely FA's and GA's don't normally use this template. Instead, any DYK appearance gets added to {{ArticleHistory}} via its |dykdate= parameter (to reduce talk page clutter). See for example Talk:Dürer's Rhinoceros. It may be possible to fill the categories Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are featured articles etc by modifying {{ArticleHistory}}. I would recommend you consult with User:Gimmetrow on this, since he is one of the few people who fully understands all the workings of {{ArticleHistory}}, and as an admin can implement any changes. Dr pda (talk) 00:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, that's a good point...I think one of my own GAs is using ArticleHistory instead of DYKtalk. I've left a message with Gimmetrow... the {{ArticleHistory}} template is a big deal, and I'm certainly not qualified or knowledgeable enough to mess around with it on my own! —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 01:13, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How are you going to keep track of all the articles to see if they make GA r FA in the future? Maybe you'd be dedicated to it and keep it going, but in your absence I don't think there'd be many people who'd like to spend their time (and it will be very time consuming) doing this. And if what Dr.PDA says is true, then I think we can easily make the categories using that template? It can automatically add it when the template gets updated when the article is promoted, and we won't have to worry ourselves about it. Chamal ^talk 01:18, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, that's the plan; no matter whether we use {{DYKtalk}} or {{ArticleHistory}} (I assume what we make will have to be compatible with both), the ultimate idea is to have something in the template so that when the article gets promoted, the person who's working on the article can just make a note of that in the template and that will add the article to the category. I think the bot that's being developed is also intended to run periodically to automatically update articles that the people working on promoting might have forgotten to (ie, if the bot encounters an article that is an FA and has a DYK in its article history, and no one entered |FC=yes , then the bot will insert that and then the template will automatically add the article to the category). At least, that is my impression of what we're trying to do. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 02:09, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would discourage adding any form of article rating to {{dyktalk}}. The {{dyktalk}} template gets incorporated into {{ArticleHistory}} whenever an article becomes FA, and most of the time when an article becomes GA or goes through peer review. At present there is only a handful of articles with both {{dyktalk}} and {{ArticleHistory}}. Gimmetrow 04:09, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yea, DYK uses the parameter |dykdate= on ArticleHistory. See Talk:Eddie Hill for an example. So you need to change your plan of attack. Do you want to add a new parameter for ArticleHistory for this purpose? Royalbroil 13:45, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably not necessary to add a new parameter. Again, I'm not familiar with the intricacies of {{ArticleHistory}} and don't want to go messing with it, but I imagine the existing parameters could be used... something like a pair of nested #if: statements to say basically "if this has something entered for |dykdate= and its |currentstatus= is FA, FL, GA (and maybe also FFA, FFL, FFA/GA, and DGA), then add [[Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are also featured articles]] or whatever."

In any case, I believe populating the categories should be pretty easy, it's just a matter of a couple lines of code in whatever template is being used. The hard part is updating hundreds of old DYKs that are now FC/GA and none of us are paying attention to anymore...that's the main reason Suntag suggested using a bot. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 21:43, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To make things a little more tangible...here is the code I had in mind (just a very rough idea; I'm sure I have some errors in there).

{{#if:{{{dykdate|}}}|
{{#ifeq:{{{currentstatus}}}|FA|[[Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are featured content]]}}
{{#ifeq:{{{currentstatus}}}|GA|[[Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are good articles]]}}
{{#ifeq:{{{currentstatus}}}|FL|[[Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are featured content]]}}}}

For anyone reading along who's not used to template code...basically what this does is, the first line checks to see whether there's anything entered under |dykdate= (in other words, whether the article has been on DYK); if there isn't, it doesn't do anything. If there is, it goes on to see if the article is currently an FA, GA, FL, or whatever. If it is, it adds the article to the appropriate category; if not, it doesn't do anything.

One issue is what to do with former/delisted featured or good articles...should they still be in the category, since they were featured/good at some time? Or not? In the case of former featured articles that have been demoted to GA, should they be in the DYK/FC category or the DYK/GA category? etc. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 21:47, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I missed this thread over Christmas, but add my voice to the chorus about doing this within articlehistory and not DYKTalk, as the latter gets absorbed into the former when an article goes through the GA/FA/FL process. To address your query, since the categories you created use the present tense ("are"), then it seems logical to include only current featured/good content. BuddingJournalist 02:25, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a fine idea, but would also check with User:SandyGeorgia as much of the FA updating work is done by a bot and we do not want to mess that up with this. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:30, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Saw my name pop up in an edit summary, so came over to see what this was about. I don't think this is a good idea at all. Gimmetrow runs GimmeBot, and he's already weighed in above on some of the problems. This will create a lot of programming work for very little payout, and create something else to be tracked, when very few of us actually do the tracking. I would not be in favor of undertaking the changes necessary to add yet another element to articlehistory, that Gimmetrow and I will end up maintaining. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:38, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think you misunderstood Gimmetrow's reply above. He was addressing Politizer's original idea to add params to the DYKTalk template (which isn't a good idea). However, Politizer's updated proposal of adding some code to articlehistory would require no extra work on anyone's part...the code just adds good/featured articles that have been on DYK to a category. BuddingJournalist 02:44, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think what Sandy means is that she and Gimmetrow do almost all article history updates. I have been a major contributor to 18 FA or FL articles and have never updated an article history - I do not know what to do. I think Sandy's point is that even one extra thing to do becomes a cumulative "lot of work" when multiplied by the thousands of FAs and GAs. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:12, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If (and that is, of course, an if) this works as I think it would, this would require only one edit, rather than thousands—updating the template code itself. Every article in which that is transcluded should then reflect that change (or at least it will reflect that change the next time the talk page is updated). Again, since I'm not familiar with this particular template or with bots and stuff, I'm not 100% sure; it was only a suggestion that I thought might be interesting. If it ends up being a huge amount of work then, as Sandy said, it might not be worth it since it's just a little fun thing that's not super-important. But I'm hoping it can be done with a minimum of effort, and no need for any labor-intensive maintenance. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 03:40, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think this was all flawed and done about in the wrong way. I would suggest a closer discussion with Sandy, some of the other FA people, and some of the GA people. Then, if anything, moving it to a Village Pump discussion. This will affect a lot of pages and a lot of areas. It is definitely not something that should be limited to the backwaters of DYK. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:38, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)This won't affect a thing. All it's doing is maybe making a list of articles that have gotten to FA or GA; the list won't be used for anything, it was just an idea for fun. It's not like I'm proposing to overhaul the whole FA criteria or something. This is not a malicious proposal at all, and there's no need to community discussion; the reason I've brought it to other editors' attention is because those are the editors who are experienced with the technical details behind the AH template and things like that. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 03:48, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, Gimmetrow is the go-to person on this; he's the one who knows if it can be done easily and how to do it best. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:47, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum In response to SG and Ottava's concerns...now that I think about this more, I think we actually won't need a bot at all to do this. If the categories can be populated just by adding some code to {{AH}} without changing the way that people actually use the template (which is the goal of the code that I suggested above), the changes should be reflected immediately (or the next time someone edits the talk page) and no one will have to change any code at those pages. Not requiring a bot should simplify things, I think. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 16:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Christmas in DYK-land

There are now about 22 Christmas DYK hooks on the suggestions page -- not yet quite enough to fill all four (?) DYK slots for Christmas day. As the time is getting near, does someone want to volunteer to figure out which queue should be used to start loading with all the DYK goodies from Santa's sleigh? Also, since they are time sensitive, we should probably put a high priority on approving any Christmas hooks that have not yet completed the review process. Cbl62 (talk) 21:08, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I thought we decided not to have all Christmas hooks all day, but rather to have a couple Christmas hooks in each update? (Or maybe I'm confusing that discussion with Darwin Day...either way, I personally feel similar about both.) —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 00:09, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am not aware of what the prior discussion was. Just raising the question. If 20 of the 22 Christmas hooks were deemed worthy, and we used them over the four Christmas Day update, that would be 5 per update, leaving room for 3 non-Christmas hooks per update. Cbl62 (talk) 01:06, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How about this as a proposal -- Spread the 20 Christmas hook over six updates starting with the current Queue 2 which will go live while it's Christmas in the Far East and Australia. That would mean about 3 or 4 Christmas hooks per update and still leave room for non-Christmas hooks? Cbl62 (talk) 01:20, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That plan sounds fine to me. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 05:31, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(outdent) I just added a Christmas-themed hook on Candy Cane Lane (much more popular than "Candy Ass Lane") to Dec. 24th - sorry for the last minute heads up. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 05:01, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Queues 2 and 3 already got filled but without Christmas hooks. These queues will go live on Christmas so we need to re-adjust. I loaded the Next Update with a mix of Christmas and non-Christmas hooks. f someone could swap the Next update in place of Queue 2 or 3 and save the Queue 2 or 3 hooks for another update, that would be great. Cbl62 (talk) 06:03, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Probably the easiest way to deal with it is to bump the current Queues 2 and 3 til after Christmas, and swap the Christmas queues in their place. If anyone has a better idea, go for it. Cbl62 (talk) 07:14, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The queue order can be easily manipulated by altering this. --BorgQueen (talk) 08:17, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Who passed...

...this article? They might need a helpful talking to about DYK rules...for one, the grammar is terrible; two, the ref does not even cover the DYK nom (for crying out loud, a Google Books link is even given right there!) -_- Anyway, rant over. Cheers all, Allanon ^{♠The Dark Druid♠} 08:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry. This sounds like I am completely angry...and possibly making a personal attack...which I am not and was not trying to do, respectively. The purpose of this was supposed to be a 'heads-up' that someone should help out the person who passed this, not as a hate message. Apologies... Allanon ^{♠The Dark Druid♠} 09:02, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That one should never have been passed. I have given it a copyedit, but I had to guess at the meaning in one or two places because the grammar was so mangled. Gatoclass (talk) 13:39, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm.. funny. That article was created and nominated by Piotrus who has a lot of experience in DYK. Maybe he hadn't managed to complete it. But I agree that it shouldn't have been passed at all. Chamal ^talk 13:46, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The entry was passed by User:Jolly Janner [5], after an initially missing in-line citation had been added. Nsk92 (talk) 14:06, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the admin that copies hooks from next update to the queue can check the articles a bit (nothing much, just a glance to see if it isn't really terrible) before copying, so that we can avoid things like this in the future? Chamal ^talk 14:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, it is not normally the admins responsibility at all. If anything, the person moving the hooks to the next update should double check if possible. However, the guy moving to the next update also shouldn't have to verify it themselves. A once over to check whether the article is still there, in a somewhat usable shape. The people verifying the hook are the people who are meant to be verifying it. In this case, someone made a simple mistake. Mistakes happen. » \ / (⁂ | ※) 22:45, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with \ / .... 99% of the time the hooks get vetted well and hooks that shouldn't be verified don't get verified; 99% of the hooks that get verified are ones that deserve to be verified. While there might occasionally be an instance where an editor accidentally verifies an article they really shouldn't have (I've done it myself), they happen so rarely that asking Next people to re-review it probably wouldn't have much payoff, and it would exponentially multiply the amount of time it takes them to prepare the next update. I don't think there would be much bang for the buck. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 00:16, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Christmas update status

OK, we've got queues 3, 4, and 5 and the Next Update ready with Christmas hook, plus others mixed in. The next two updates after these should also be a mix of Christmas hooks and others (roughly 4 of each). On Queue 3, if someone can protect the image, I'd appreciate it. I inserted it directly into the Queue without protecting it (I don't know how). Finally, once Queue 1 moves to the Main Page we should direct the bot to skip Queue 2 and go directly to Queue 3, as by that time it will be Christmas in much of the Eastern Hemisphere. Still a few Christmas hooks that need verification, too. Cbl62 (talk) 09:11, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We have a new bot on a trial run now. Really convenient. --BorgQueen (talk) 10:08, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The next update has the "(pictured)" with the wrong hook, just fyi. --IvoShandor (talk) 11:37, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Looks OK to me. You're talking about the cookie right? Chamal ^talk 12:04, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Announcement

Just to let everyone know what is going on, BQ and I have agreed to go to an eight hour cycle over Christmas because it will be Christmas somewhere in the world over the next 48 hours or so, and we only have enough Xmas hooks for six updates. The next update will have the first set of Xmas hooks, and there are three more ready to go, so that means we need to put together two more Xmas updates with 3 Xmas hooks apiece (because there are only six left on the Suggestions page) and then we will have the whole of Xmas covered. BTW, there are two updates in the queue right now with no Xmas hooks but we are just going to bump past those until all the Xmas updates have been featured. Cheers and Merry Christmas everyone! :) Gatoclass (talk) 13:25, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

All six Christmas updates are now done, and not a single hook about war, weaponry, mayhem, or gratuitous sexual content. Peace! Cbl62 (talk) 17:44, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Cbl, you've done a good job there :) Gatoclass (talk) 04:29, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, besides my Christmas in the American Civil War one. ;) BTW, due to being a double hook I didn't include it with the Xmas DYKs, but I do have a hook where one of the highlighted articles is Bethlehem, Indiana, should we need a replacement hook.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 21:54, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Announcement

I will be taking a holiday trip soon, within next 24 hours, so please take a good care of DYK while I am absent. I will probably take my laptop with me but am not 100 percent sure I will have an Internet access there. I've already told Gatoclass how to change the time interval and I am crossing my fingers and hope that things will go smoothly. I will be back in a week or so. See you next year, guys! --BorgQueen (talk) 15:09, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Safe journey!--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 15:33, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh NOES. BQ is leaving, now the rest of us will have to get busy!

Just kidding, thanks for all your hard work at DYK thru 2008 BQ, you've earned a good break! Looking forward to your return :) Gatoclass (talk) 06:11, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bugged bot

The DYKadminbot seems to have bugged and replaced T:DYK with an empty list [6], skipping queue 2. As I have very little experience with DYK, can someone clueful handle it? --Aqwis (talk – contributions) 22:21, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, since BorgQueen is absent and the previous set of hooks was getting staler than fruitcake, I've added the hooks from the "lost" queue #2 to the template by hand. I'm quite new at this so things like archiving, credits, and such are a mystery. (But I'm working on it.) Anybody with more DYK experience who wants to jump in, please do so. - Dravecky (talk) 01:59, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So it appears that the bot handed out all of the credit on the articles and BorgQueen on all the talk pages so that's taken care of already. The bot's next scheduled update is at midnight Dallas time so if anybody up late on the US west coast or up early on the other side of the Atlantic could make sure the next update goes smoothly, that would be appreciated. (I'll try to be here but I've been up since 4am, so....) - the trying-to-save-Christmas Dravecky (talk) 02:10, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've manually uploaded an identical copy of the cookie photos and protected per the instructions. I think that's everything for now. (Hope to goodness I'm doing this right.) - Dravecky (talk) 02:27, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for stepping in and fixing things, Dravecky. If there is a "Barnstar for Saving Christmas" around here somewhere, you've earned it. --Orlady (talk) 04:14, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

At least no one ruined Christmas. I always ruin Christmas. :-) --IvoShandor (talk) 05:27, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ooops, the DYKadminBot just did it again.... I've left a note on the bot's creator's usertalkpage. Hope this helps. --PFHLai (talk) 06:46, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's it; no Christmas bonus for it.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 06:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've blocked both DYKadminBot and DYKBot until I can look into it (not at home so I couldn't switch them off). So updates will have to be manual. ~ User:Ameliorate! ^{(with the !) (talk)} 12:31, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've worked out what happened. [7][8] The bot looks for the hooks between  and . Of course the "Next next update" didn't have these tags and so it was easy to replace it when copying the hooks over. My fault as 1) I should have pointed out how important those tags are and 2) the bot should check the tags are there and if they aren't then stop, not blank the template it if can't find them. ~ User:Ameliorate! ^{(with the !) (talk)} 12:57, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The next two queues have these tags so everything is good to go, no further manual updates should be needed. ~ User:Ameliorate! ^{(with the !) (talk)} 13:03, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it should be added to the editnotices of the pages not to remove those tags? Chamal ^talk 13:06, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well done Ameliorate! That was quick work. I just popped back to do a manual upload but thought I'd better check here first, good thing I did because it appears you've saved me the trouble :) Gatoclass (talk) 14:14, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Um, wait, it appears I spoke too soon. The update hasn't actually updated, it seems to have disappeared into the ether. So it looks like there's still some sort of bug. Gatoclass (talk) 14:20, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As the update had been manually done there was no  tag on the template itself and because the bot finds and replaces [...] with the content from the queue it had nothing to replace. I should've thought about that but everything should be good to go now (although I did say that before and it didn't work ...) ~ User:Ameliorate! ^{(with the !) (talk)} 15:25, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, we'll see how it goes next time. Thanks for the explanation :) Gatoclass (talk) 16:16, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Remember Last Night?

Can someone please fix the DYK notice on Talk:Remember Last Night?. Thanks. Otto4711 (talk) 02:14, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Got it. It looks like the "?" in the article name caused the bot to prematurely end the string when it was gathering text to enter with the template. - Dravecky (talk) 02:32, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am awed by your speed. Otto4711 (talk) 02:35, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Randy L. Bott

The claim that his tests are called "celebrations" is on the main page right now, yet the source it was cited to {ratemyprofessor.com) did not say anything like this, it was simply a top ten list, no text, no additional information. Either the wrong ref was used by mistake or this is a case of OR slipping by DYK. Honestly, this hook should probably be removed from the template asap. --IvoShandor (talk) 10:16, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Woody removed it just now. Two mistakes in three days, we really should be more careful. Are the instructions for verifying hooks not clear enough? Maybe new reviewers find them confusing. Doesn't really look like it but I don't see any other explanation. Chamal ^talk 11:30, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That article was approved by Ecoleetage. Maybe someone should ask him about it. Gatoclass (talk) 12:29, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It was my fault for not providing the more precise source, which was at Ratemyprofessors.com but on a subpage. I thought I had provided it. The issue should now be resolved. --Eustress (talk) 15:05, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We wouldn't have accepted that anyway because it's just an anonymous post on a public forum, but thankyou for explaining where the claim originated. Gatoclass (talk) 04:59, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bot still malfunctioning

I had to manually update because the bot still isn't working properly, it cleared the queue page as if it had posted the update but then didn't post it. For this reason, can I please ask users to keep an eye on it to see whether or not it works properly next time. Thanks, Gatoclass (talk) 15:28, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The bot reset the timer about 30 minutes ago but didn't even attempt to move queue 1 over. If someone with more experience can tackle this immediately, I'll hold off for a few minutes. If not, I'll try and muddle through again. (I did already add the "HooksEnd" tag as discussed above but about 24 minutes after the bot reset the clock but not the hooks.) - Dravecky (talk) 20:45, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The bot appears to have malfunctioned here, the description entered has nothing to do with the article in question. It appears that should have been entered at Talk:Dustbin Baby (film), which appears to have heen at DYK recently. D.M.N. (talk) 20:57, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just manually updated - the bot had blanked Queue 5 but not moved the content. Is there anything else that should be done? Nancy ^talk 21:38, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Huzzah! It appears that the bot is back in business. Can anybody tell me if restoring that "HooksEnd" tag was the difference or was some other change made to make it work as advertised? - Dravecky (talk) 02:35, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately though, it is still updating on an 8 hour cycle after I switched it to a six hour cycle last night. If it doesn't rectify itself with the next update, I think we will have to switch back to manual updates again as we now have more than 200 hooks on the Suggestions page. Gatoclass (talk) 04:54, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good news: the bot did a proper update after 6 hours (and five minutes). Bad news: it failed to put the {{dyktalk}} templates on Magnolia Grove (Greensboro, Alabama) and Wang Shizhen (Tang Dynasty) although I have just done so manually. Why these two? Could the parentheses be preventing the bot from properly making the edit, somehow? - Dravecky (talk) 08:43, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, probably. The bot has had a few problems with special characters previously. I guess someone needs to nudge Ameliorate again. Gatoclass (talk) 10:21, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The clock was on an 8-hour cycle because BorgQueen edited {{DYK-Refresh}} for the Christmas hooks. I've just now undone those changes so the display is back to the usual 6-hour cycle. - Dravecky (talk) 10:31, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I don't think that changes the actual cycle, it only changes the display, but that's what was confusing me. To change the time cycle, you have to edit the User:DYKadminBot/time page. Gatoclass (talk) 10:39, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I saw that one, too, but also saw that you had changed it back already. Finding the DYK-Refresh template was a simple matter of examining BQ's contribs and seeing what had been changed in the last few days. - Dravecky (talk) 11:41, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bot didn't give me my talk page notice for either of my new articles so it may still have a bug somewhere.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 06:30, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My first Next Update

As part of trying to pitch in here during the holidays with so many "usual suspects" away from their keyboards, I've constructed my first Next Update using a mix of topics and localities from the oldest existing noms while trying to separate similar topics and balance the lengths, per the many examples I've seen in the past. Before anybody does anything crazy like move it to Queue 4, I'd appreciate it quite a bit if somebody would give it a quick review to make sure I've done this correctly. (Oh, and I didn't move up my own verified hook because that seemed like a conflict of interest so perhaps somebody could put that in the next Next Update.) Thanks. - Dravecky (talk) 08:25, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not bad, but a quick glance suggests that (a) most if not all the hooks are on serious topics, (b) a shortage of bio hooks, (c) the two bio hooks that are there are next to each other.

You might benefit from reading User:Art_LaPella/Unwritten_rules#Unwritten_rules_of_thumb_for_preparing_updates if you haven't already, it has a few tips on how to put good updates together. Gatoclass (talk) 10:32, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, you don't really have to take hooks from the "oldest existing" noms. If they have been approved they will eventually get promoted anyhow, so you can take a hook from pretty much anywhere, although as a general rule of thumb we do tend to take them from the sections closer to expiry more frequently. Gatoclass (talk) 10:42, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd read the "unwritten" rules but just made a mistake putting the bios together. I was focused on the street-naming aspect and trying to keep it away from the other place and transportation hooks and completely spaced on the article being a biography. Okay, they're shuffled but I'm going to grab a "funny" one then bump the Iraqi lawyer to the Next Next for now. - Dravecky (talk) 10:48, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, I guess the holidays really bring out the morose in content creators. The approved hooks are things like suicide bags, animals sacrificed for medical research, commandos fighting Nazis, and other not-very-lighthearted fare. I've grabbed something at least a lot lighter if not actually funny and slotted it at the end, per the unwritten rules. - Dravecky (talk) 11:19, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, it's pretty difficult to put a balanced update together ATM because all the lighter hooks got used up over Christmas/Boxing Day and all we have left are the plodders. So I guess you just happen to have chosen an inopportune moment to try your hand :)

Still, I think you've done well under the circumstances, so welcome aboard :) Gatoclass (talk) 11:23, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Transwikied articles

Are articles translated from another Wiki eligible for DYK? If so, does the "last 5 days" rule mean that the article must have been translated into English within the last 5 days? Thanks. Truthanado (talk) 16:56, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good question. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe when you start the translation it's considered a new article and is eligible for DYK; after that, it is treated just like any other new article (it has to have been started within the past 5 days). Referencing is important; there might be things that aren't tagged with ^{[citation needed]} in the other-language version but should be here.

My article Suanmeitang is a recent translation from Chinese and just got verified, but I also added a lot (there were no sources originally, so I added sources and did a lot of rewriting). So it's not just a direct translation, and might not be the best to compare to, but anyway, it's there. Anyway, it would probably be good to hear what some of the more experienced DYK people have to say. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since they are new to en.wikipedia, I have always considered them new articles. Gatoclass (talk) 17:37, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A clear double standard, when "new" was defined above as information created for wikipedia and doesn't appear elsewhere. Ottava Rima (talk) 17:45, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Articles that didn't exist on Wikipedia before they were created are articles that most English-speaking Wikipedia users couldn't read before they were created. Articles that only existed on another language Wikipedia are also articles that most English-speaking Wikipedia users couldn't read before they were created. So for the majority of our readers, they are both "new." —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 17:58, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A translation of a previously published text is not new within law, ethics, or any sense of the term. The attempt to claim it is now shows a clear double standard within DYK. This really should be stopped. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:05, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Also, it should be noted that community consensus says that wikipedia is not a reliable source, and user based translations are not reliable. Thus, there are two marks of unreliability against translated pages. Even then, the sources wouldn't be in English, which is a further problem. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:08, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User-based translations are no less reliable than any other user-based writing. Everything on WP is done by users. As for the sources...non-English sources is not a problem for DYK, there are many articles that make DYK with all foreign-language sources. It would be a problem for GA or FA, but as far as I know DYK accepts foreign-language sources in most circumstances. Finally, English sources can be added as the article is edited; again, see my example above, which uses nearly all English sources.

As far as I know, DYK doesn't base its definition of "newness" on whether or not the article is legally or ethically new (although those issues also come into effect, especially in cases of plagiarism concerns), but on whether it is new for readers; that's the main reason for the guideline that articles should be created or expanded within the past 5 days, to ensure that it will be something readers haven't had a chance to see yet. As such, translated material is probably new to most WP readers.

But no one here is trying to enforce some evil double standards; these are just my guesses about what the consensus may be. I have already said that it would be useful to hear from more regulars. If you think the current way of thinking about things is a problem, you're welcome to make a proposal to add a guideline about translated articles. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"translations are no less reliable" Consensus at MoS which was done per a problem with translations at FAC determined otherwise. Furthermore, this is already used text. If someone wants to create a page on a subject carried on another wiki, they should probably start from scratch in English and build it up that way. The problem is not the "current way of thinking about things", its the fact that you and others here are disconnecting themselves from the rest of the encyclopedia. There is a large discussion that takes place in other areas across many projects and guideline pages. Why does DYK always limit itself in one tiny area? Just as above with the bot, Politizer, if you would have gone out to the more appropriate places, you would see that there is a big consensus on what is standard around here. DYK is not an isolated group. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:21, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, I didn't disconnect myself from anyone, I specifically welcomed other opinions ([9]) and said that you are welcome to create a proposal and generate more discussion ([10]). I never said I was unwilling to hear other opinions.

About the reliability of translations...granted, I don't know exactly what MoS consensus you're referring to since you didn't provide a link, but to the best of my knowledge, the consensus is that user-generated translations of foreign-language sources (for the purposes of quoting, etc.) are less reliable than third-party translations of the same sources. For translation of foreign-language Wikipedia articles, though, I don't see how that applies; when you write a new article on en.wiki translated from zh.wiki or wherever else, you're still starting and writing an article, and just with any article-writing it's all done by users and falls under what WP has in general to say about what users write. There's no reason that en.wiki articles translated from elsewhere should be considered any worse- or better-written than en.wiki articles that the user writes from scratch, because in both cases it's still a user who's doing the writing.

The thing about the bot is unrelated to this and you have no reason to bring it up here (heck, I have doubts that you even understand it). But since you chose to bring it up, oh well, here it is. I made a friendly, good faith offer to work on something that might help with some record-keeping for the project (if you look more closely at the section above, you'll see that a bot isn't even an important part of it; it's just the part that you've chosen to rail on) and you've chosen to respond to it by throwing it back in my face and trying to say it makes me an asshole. Real cool. I'll let someone else talk to you now. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:32, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Outdent. Good intentions pave the road to hell. Having good faith when proposing something is a nice defense if you are up for block, but making a proposal is not based on good faith. Its based on what the community needs and what is best for the community. It normally involves a lot of people. Having translations should go through MoS because it deals with how translations are as a whole. There is even a wikiproject for translations. If you want to go about and put forth new understandings of translations, at least go to the places that deal with it first. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:38, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever. I didn't make the proposal for the "community," I made it for a DYK subpage. DYK has lots of subpages that don't need community consensus (see WP:DYKBEST, which is just a list of DYK hooks that have gotten lots of hits). People who work at AfD or SBL don't care about whether or not I make a fun subpage for DYK. If you had actually looked at what I was saying, you would see that I never suggested any changes to the FAC or GAN process, or to how the {{ArticleHistory}} template is actually used; in other words, I didn't suggest a single thing that would affect you in the slightest way. If anyone else had made the proposal then you wouldn't care; you're just looking for something I do to whine about. If you think my idea is going to "pave the road to hell," then go to the appropriate place (hint: not this section) and say what you think it is going to hurt; don't go around bitching to people about how I'm a bad editor and am circumventing WP process. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:46, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Politizer, I really think you need to have a long discussion with User:Kim Bruning about consensus and what consensus is on wikipedia. It will do you a lot of good. He is our resident expert and lectured for a long time about consensus on wikipedia. And what is this about a "fun subpage" stuff? I was talking above about the interpretation of "new" when it comes to translation and how it conflicts with multiple guidelines about translations, and I mentioned that the rushing in without talking to experts or questioning them first is the same problem as above. Why would it really hurt you to discuss with people who know about these things and take your time? Wikipedia is not a project for rushing, and speed tends to be opposite of what Wikipedia is about. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:52, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I wasn't talking about the translation issue, I've chosen to stop paying attention to it because I've already said what I think. I was responding to your bullshit attempts to discredit me and make it sound as if I'm proposing sweeping, earth-shattering changes to WP (regarding the GA/FA thing, not the translation thing—if it's confusing to have that topic coming up in this section, you can blame yourself for having brought it up) when all I was doing was talking about making one tiny DYK thing that wouldn't even affect the people at FAC or GAN. I know what consensus is and how it works, and I know that I don't need community-wide consensus from thousands of people to make a tiny little change; the only people I need to discuss it with are the DYK people whom I'm doing it for, and the people in charge of the upkeep of the {{ArticleHistory}} template that I was proposing to edit (and I have contacted that person, Gimmetrow, already). Again, it wouldn't change a single thing about what you do on WP and you would never even notice the difference, unless you like going through template code. It's not like I'm trying to add a 6th pillar or something. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 18:58, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Politizer, you can use vulgarity and claim I am trying to "discredit" you all that you want. However, this is the third time that a change has been attempted that does not match what the community says, and when it was mentioned that it should be taken to a larger audience that you stepped in and had a problem. The only reason why Gimmetrow et al came to the page about the ArticleHistory is from the fact that I left a note on the FA director's page. Normally, discussing an issue without bringing in people who are regularly involved in an area is seen as highly rude and problematic. Why don't you try to be inclusive to the greater community instead of criticizing those who stand by tradition? Ottava Rima (talk) 19:07, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't criticize those who "stand by tradition," I criticize those who come and call me "rude" for offering to do something nice. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 19:21, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am extremely confused as how you can say reinterpreting guidelines and proposing changes to systems without contacting those involved is "offering to do something nice", nor how you can claim that I said you were rude when I stated that people would see it as rude if you didn't contact them. Ottava Rima (talk) 19:30, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, making a little list of articles for fun is TOTALLY a reinterpretation of Wikipedia guidelines. Haha. That's a funny one. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 19:34, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Politizer, you do a disservice to yourself by purposely merging three different things into one and ignoring the problems raised. Ottava Rima (talk) 01:12, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ottava's being a silly sausage. Common sense certainly tells us that translated articles are eligible, as long as they meet the sourcing requirements. --NE2 19:37, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A final comment by original questioner: I thought I was asking a simple question. It was prompted out of curiosity when I saw Meldemannstraße dormitory (which has a very interesting hook) listed on WP:TDYK for "Articles created/expanded on December 23" while I was trying to help patrol the list of candidate articles. I guess I'll leave that to the "DYK experts" in the future. Please put this discussion to rest. Truthanado (talk) 22:54, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You're not the only one frustrated by the degrading nature of this talk page. It's now become a battleground for certain users to take passive aggressive swipes at each other, all while ignoring the actual issues at hand. Too many threads have been hijacked to the detriment of Wikipedia. It was such a simple question. Instead of an answer, we get kilobytes of pathetic back and forth sniping. I, for one, have unwatched this page. BuddingJournalist 02:34, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Transwikied article - questions on their status

Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects

I am not sure if this pertains to the current discussion. However, there has been a problem at FAC (and with articles in general) being translated automatically by Google or other automatic translating device. The translations obtained this way are usually inaccurate. There have been specific articles where the editor claimed to have translated it, then admitted it had been done automatically, then said he had a friend look over it for inaccuracies etc. It was agreed in FAC discussion that such translations were only acceptable if everyone involved in the translation was fluent both in English and in the language being translated. If not, then there would accuracy problems and a question of satisfying the fundamental policy of WP:V and WP:RS.

Also, at some point in the past there have been efforts to disallow links from wiki sister projects to be allowed in the body of an article on the ground that, although these projects are hosted by wiki servers, they are not Wikipedia, do not have the same standards and fact-checking requirements as Wikipedia, and should be treated just the same as links to article from any wiki. Therefore, they should go under External links only. As far as I know, this issue has not been definitively resolved.

There have been discussions over whether wiki sister projects should be promoted in any way on Wikipedia. That argument has apparently been decided in favor of allowing the links, as recently they have begun appearing to the right of Wikipedia links when a search of Wikipedia is done.

However, I am unclear as to the status regarding reliability of wiki sister projects and whether they have the same status on Wikipedia as articles produced for Wikipedia do. If anyone can point me to policy information on these issues, I would appreciate it.

I am going to post a similar question at the Village Pump. —Mattisse (Talk) 20:10, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, I wasn't a participant in any of those discussions so I'm not totally familiar with the issues, but personally I treat additions the same no matter where they came from—whether they're a paraphrase of a source that the author is referencing, or just something the author is pulling out of his head, or translated from another WP project. I don't care where the person got it, as long as they provide good sources and adhere to the various policy guidelines. If an addition to an article on en.wiki is comes from article text on zh.wiki, I treat it just as if it was a new addition—look for a reference, give it a {{fact}} or {{or}} tag if there is none, yada yada. No matter what state it was in at its originally wiki, it needs to meet the standards when it comes to en.wiki. So I sometimes criticize a translated article or nominate it for deletion, but when I do that it's not just because it's a translated article; it's because the article is unreferenced or has other problems that I would treat the same way if it had been a brand-new article. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 20:23, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The last time translated versions came up (relatively recently) an article was presented for FAC. Originally, no mention was made that it was a translated article, as I recall. When questions came up regarding the information and the sources, the editor said that it had come from an alternate language Wikipedia article, and justified its accuracy and the accuracy of its sources on that basis. He also admitted that he did not know the language in question, but trusted the translations. At that point, a discussion ensued o the adequacy of translations (automatic translations were ruled out, and a standard invoked that the translator(s) must be fluent in both languages. The issue was also raised other language Wikipedias in general had lower standards of reliability and verifiability. In other words, although an editor could use an Wikipedia article in another language as a basis, he had, in essence, to rewrite the article and verify sources, finding English languages ones ideally for all the references. I am not sure how this applies to "sister projects", nor what their standards for reliability and verifiability are. I know that images are regularly deleted from the Commons, not infrequently because they do not represent what they are purported to. I am just looking for information here, as I am not very familiar with the standards of the sister projects. —Mattisse (Talk) 20:38, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

" I wasn't a participant in any of those discussions so I'm not totally familiar with the issues," Which is why I told you that you need to get involved with the larger community and start talking to the people that are. This is why there are so many problems as of late. You are purposefully isolating yourself from the community, which does a disservice to both DYK and the community. We are one project, not separate groups. As Mattisse points out, translations are unreliable, and deemed unreliable. If someone wants to base their page off of text on another, but completely rewrite and independently verify the information and source it, then it is not a translation. Thus, there would be no problem. But translations are simply copy and pasting, then turning it into English. There is no verification. No reliability. Nothing. This is very problematic. Ottava Rima (talk) 01:09, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ottava Rima, I completely agree with you. This is extremely problematic, not just for DKY but for any article on Wikipedia. Such articles, bases on questionable translations, are not, in general, allowed on Wikipedia as I understand the policies and guidelines. It would undermine Wikipedia to allow this. —Mattisse (Talk) 02:17, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that a simple translation from another language article is not the same as a new article. But something based on that article, using reliable sources to verify the facts, is a different matter. We'll see how the discussion at WP:VPP goes.

Ottava, you obviously see problems (big ones, too) about how DYK operates. How about you give us those problems clearly along with your suggestions to correct them? We can then discuss them and decide how to refine the project. Giving hints here is not going to help you, us or the community, and will only create heated discussions which I'm sure none of us wants. Chamal ^talk 03:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I don't think there is a problem. My feeling is that people need to unify themselves witht he whole community. DYK is the beginning of a long and complex process that involves tens of thousands of dedicated editors. We should include the whole community and make sure that we have a unified system. We shouldn't be afraid of others opinions. Consensus changes, opinions change, but we should always be on top of what is happening and always know each others's concerns. Wikipedia needs well rounded users and view points from highly specialized users together. My challenge to Politizer is for him to hunt down some of these highly specialized users so he can become more well rounded. We have plenty of deeply specialized DYK people, but few well rounded community people willing to spend a lot of time here. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:27, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can go fuck yourself, Ottava Rima. Here I took an effort to participate in a discussion that is new to me, while admitting that I am new to the topic; I haven't been involved in previous discussions on it because I'm a relatively new editor and I don't happen to have every single page on WP on my watchlist. I happen to be involved in several different areas, just not the ones that you happen to think I ought to be involved in. This is now at least the second time that I've tried to be helpful to someone and get involved in a discussion, and you've thrown in back in my face and singled me out in front of my peers to criticize me for some imagined slights. I am sick of your stupid bitching and I am sick of putting up with this shit. Politizer ^talk/_contribs 13:49, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As DYK currently operates, articles based on PD sources are accepted, just not preferred. Since other wikis are PD sources, we can accept transwikied articles so long as they meet all the usual requirements here, such as NPOV, V and so on. There is no existing policy on wikipedia banning transwikied articles, and until there is I see little reason to change our policy at DYK. Gatoclass (talk) 05:31, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If blockquotes aren't accepted from PD sources as new content, then full on copying without blockquote is not acceptable, Gatoclass. Never has PD sources been accepted as acceptable under DYK. Never would pages from EB1911 be listed as DYK. Never would any of the other PD works be listed as DYK. You should know this and probably do know this. Your comment should be struck immediately. What you stated is 100% against what our policies and guidelines state, and you know that. Ottava Rima (talk) 05:42, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Quite frankly, I've had it with your combative, hostile attitude to discussion on these pages. You generated over 100 pages of useless discussion here over the last few weeks because you didn't bother to acquaint yourself properly with our rules, choosing to prevaricate endlessly instead with users who have far more experience of the mechanics of DYK than you. You have already managed to drive away a couple of our valued contributors, at least temporarily, and now it seems you want to start again. If you don't stop this, I am going to move to have you topic banned from DYK.

Just for the record however, I will respond to your comments here once again. You claim that "never has PD sources been accepted as acceptable under DYK." In doing so you just display your ignorance and laziness again, since a quick look at our basic rules would demonstrate the incorrectness of your claim. The only reference to PD sources in our rules is (I quote) Try to pick articles that are original to Wikipedia (not 1911 or other data sources) and interesting to a wide audience. That is to say, PD sources are not ruled out for submission, they are just not preferred over original (and interesting) content - which is how that rule has always been interpreted. I myself have dozens of DYK awards based on DANFS, which is a PD source. In a nutshell, you have no idea as usual what you are talking about.

As for your claim that blockquotes are equivalent to PD - not so. An article based on a reliable source that happens to be PD can generally be assumed to have meaningful content. The trouble with articles based on blockquotes, on the other hand, is that a user can easily create a 1500 char article with virtually no meaningful content at all, just a bunch of blockquotes strung together with a line or two of introduction. In fact, we had some complaints about your own recent barrage of Milton articles, that some users felt lacked sufficient meaningful content even though they had 1500 chars of content not counting the blockquotes. That is why we don't count blockquotes. Gatoclass (talk) 06:31, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK guys, we're all going overboard here :( Being regular participants here don't make us the only ones who can decide how it goes. On the other hand, any editor of Wikipedia has the right to express his ideas and criticize our rules and the way we operate, but in that case alternatives should be given by which we can improve. Surely both sides can keep the discussion civil and free of personal attacks. Also, the project should not be blamed for individual editors' faults. Any such problems can be resolved without harming the project I think, whether it is a regular or otherwise. If I'm hurting your feelings with this, any of you guys, I'm sorry. But it looks to me like we're making a mountain out of an anthill. Chamal ^talk 08:18, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, people have a right to criticize and to make proposals. What they don't have a right to do is constantly question the ethics of others, insinuate that they are liars, misrepresent their positions, behave generally with gratuitous hostility and wikilawyer endlessly to create needless strife.

Thanks to Ottava Rima, we just lost a highly valued contributor to the project, and I have no intention of allowing him to drive any more of our valued contributors away. Gatoclass (talk) 08:42, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

DYKbot gave no creation credits

On the last update, DYKbot gave no creation credits; just nomination credits.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 07:38, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Which one do you mean - the one on the front page now? The bot seems to have given out at least some of the creation credits for that one - I didn't check all of them. Gatoclass (talk) 07:59, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I've just gone through and manually handed out the credits to all the creators and expanders. On a separate note, for some reason, Bethlehem, Indiana was part of a double hook entry but apparently no template for that half of the hook was entered by the admin who assembled the queue. - Dravecky (talk) 08:02, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Kudos to Dravecky.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 08:03, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I nominated Mifter as the updater in the DYKbotdo string. I notice Mifter has done something odd with his user page so that it is called "Mifter's user page" instead of just "User:Mifter". Possibly this confused the bot so it spat the dummy and just skipped the creds. It's the only thing I can think of that may have gone wrong.

I see that Ameliorate has retired, so I guess there'll be no further help from that quarter. Gatoclass (talk) 08:15, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mifter has just placed a <div> banner thingy over the "User:Mifter". I don't think that would affect the bot. Are we going back to the old school way then? No use keeping a malfunctioning bot. Until we get them fixed, maybe we should do the whole process manually to avoid any confusion. Chamal ^talk 10:13, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I still think it's worthwhile keeping the bot going, even if the credits are malfuctioning. We may be able to figure out what is wrong with it, and the regularity of the bot has proven remarkably useful at working its way through backlogs. If we switch back to manual updates you can be sure there's going to be a lot more work trying to keep up with the number of submissions. Gatoclass (talk) 10:49, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've asked User:MessedRocker to take a look at it for us. Gatoclass (talk) 12:46, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What?! I can't believe that I had a role in pushing Ameliorate to retire! I was supporting him/her for adminship! How could that possibly be a problem? Could someone else approach Ameliorate and ask for the code? Maybe someone else could run the bot on their computer. We need this functionality. Royalbroil 13:34, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Cite error: The named reference example was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[example-1] ^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Cite error: The named reference example was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[1]

@@ Line 932: / Line 932: @@
 ::::Ottava, you obviously see problems (big ones, too) about how DYK operates. How about you give us those problems clearly along with your suggestions to correct them? We can then discuss them and decide how to refine the project. Giving hints here is not going to help you, us or the community, and will only create heated discussions which I'm sure none of us wants. [[User:Chamal_N|'''<span style="color:#000080">C</span>h<span style="color:#0000FF">a</span><span style="color:#4169E1">m</span><span style="color:#1E90FF">a</span><span style="color:#87CEEB">l</span>''']] [[User talk:Chamal_N|<sup>talk</sup>]] 03:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
 :::::Actually, I don't think there is a problem. My feeling is that people need to unify themselves witht he whole community. DYK is the beginning of a long and complex process that involves tens of thousands of dedicated editors. We should include the whole community and make sure that we have a unified system. We shouldn't be afraid of others opinions. Consensus changes, opinions change, but we should always be on top of what is happening and always know each others's concerns. Wikipedia needs well rounded users and view points from highly specialized users together. My challenge to Politizer is for him to hunt down some of these highly specialized users so he can become more well rounded. We have plenty of deeply specialized DYK people, but few well rounded community people willing to spend a lot of time here. [[User:Ottava Rima|Ottava Rima]] ([[User talk:Ottava Rima|talk]]) 04:27, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
+::::::You can go fuck yourself, Ottava Rima.  Here I took an effort to participate in a discussion that is new to me, while admitting that I am new to the topic; I haven't been involved in previous discussions on it because I'm a relatively new editor and I don't happen to have every single page on WP on my watchlist.  I happen to be involved in several different areas, just not the ones that you happen to think I ought to be involved in.  This is now at least the second time that I've tried to be helpful to someone and get involved in a discussion, and you've thrown in back in my face and singled me out in front of my peers to criticize me for some imagined slights.  I am sick of your stupid bitching and I am sick of putting up with this shit. [[User:Politizer|Politizer]]&nbsp;<small><sup>[[User talk:Politizer|talk]]</sup></small>/<small><sub>[[Special:Contributions/Politizer|contribs]]</sub></small> 13:49, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
 As DYK currently operates, articles based on PD sources are accepted, just not preferred. Since other wikis are PD sources, we can accept transwikied articles so long as they meet all the usual requirements here, such as NPOV, V and so on. There is no existing policy on wikipedia banning transwikied articles, and until there is I see little reason to change our policy at DYK. [[User:Gatoclass|Gatoclass]] ([[User talk:Gatoclass|talk]]) 05:31, 28 December 2008 (UTC)