Wikipedia:Did you know/Guidelines

To some extent, DYK approval is a subjective process. No amount of studying rules, almost-rules, and precedents will guarantee approval; nor will violating any rule guarantee disapproval. Just because an unfamiliar criterion is not listed does not mean a nomination cannot be disqualified. The subjective decision might depend on an attempt to circumvent the details of the rules, especially if the attempt does not address the underlying purpose of improving the hook and article.

Articles

Newness

Articles featured at DYK must be new at the time of nomination. For DYK purposes, an article is considered new if, within the last seven days, the article has been created in mainspace from a redlink or redirect; expanded at least fivefold in terms of its prose portion; promoted to good article status; moved from userspace or draftspace into mainspace; or translated from another Wikipedia. Articles that have been re-created from deletion may be considered new. The "seven days old" limit can be extended for a day or two upon request.

An article is ineligible for DYK if it has previously appeared on the main page as a bold link at DYK, unless the article was then deleted as a copyright violation. It is also ineligible if it has, within the year prior to nomination, appeared as a boldlink at In the news (ITN) or in the prose section of Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries (OTD), or as Today's featured article (TFA). Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of OTD are not disqualified, nor are names listed in "Recent deaths" section of ITN.

Fivefold expansion

Articles can be made eligible via a fivefold expansion of an article's prose. This calculation is made from the last version of the article before the expansion began, even if text from the original was deleted in the process (unless the text was a copyright violation, in which case it does not count towards the size of the original). This may be a bad surprise, but we don't have enough time and volunteers to reach consensus on the quality of each previous article.

Some people think we're mindless bureaucratic meanies for wanting a 100,000-character article to be expanded to 500,000. But please don't miss the forest for the trees. We didn't want you to nominate a 100,000-character existing article; we wanted a new article. If it isn't new, you could still potentially nominate when it gets promoted to a good article.

Length

Articles featured at DYK must exceed 1500 bytes of prose. Text that is not original does not count, including text copied from the public domain and from other Wikipedia articles. Splits from non-new articles are ineligible, but if the copied text does not exceed one-fifth of the total prose size, the article can be considered eligible as a fivefold expansion of the copied text. Articles split from new articles remain eligible, unless the parent article only qualifies as a newly good article. New text may not count towards the length requirement of more than one article.

Prose size

The prose size of an article is the amount of raw text contained in the article. That includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces, but should exclude wikitext, templates, lists, tables, section headers, image captions, block quotes, the table of contents, and references. DYKcheck is generally considered the authoritative counter of prose size, but manual counts are admissible as well. The byte counts indicated in an article's revision history are useless for DYK purposes, but DYKcheck will work correctly on old revisions.

External policy compliance

The article must be based on reliable sources, which must be cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose). The use of multiple sources is generally preferred, though more leeway may be given for more obscure topics. Sources should be properly labelled; that is, not under an "External links" header, and not bare URLs.

The hook fact in the article should be cited no later than the end of the sentence in which it appears. If a part of the hook fact appears multiple times, including across multiple boldlinked articles, only one of those fragments need conform to this rule. Citations at the end of the paragraph are not sufficient, and this rule applies even when a citation would not be required for the purposes of the article. However, if the whole of the hook fact is split over multiple parts of an article, each of those parts should be assessed separately, citing each one at the end of the line in which it appears.

Articles should be neutral, verifiable, and free of copyright violations, including close paraphrasing. All content subject to the policy on biographies of living persons must conform with it.

Presentability

There is a reasonable expectation that an article—even a short one—that is to appear on the front page should appear to be complete and not some sort of work in progress. Therefore, articles which include unexpanded headers are likely to be rejected. Articles that fail to deal adequately with the topic are also likely to be rejected. For example, an article about a book that fails to summarize the book's contents, but contains only a bio of the author and some critics' views, is likely to be rejected as insufficiently comprehensive.

The article should not be subject to unresolved edit-warring or the presence of stub or dispute tags. (Removing the tags without consensus does not count.) An orphan tag is not a dispute tag. Articles nominated for deletion must go on hold until the process has concluded.

Hooks

Style

The hook should include a definite fact that is mentioned in the article and likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by readers with no special knowledge or interest. The most interesting hooks are the ones that leave the reader wanting to know more – we want people to see the new articles our volunteers have put time and effort into crafting, and a hook that excites the reader into wanting to know more goes a long way towards that goal. At the same time, excessively sensational or gratuitous hooks should be rejected. DYK is not in the business of shock or clickbait, and is first and foremost a front-facing part of a highly visible encyclopedia.

Make sure to provide any necessary context for your hook – don't assume everyone worldwide knows what country or sport you're talking about.

If the subject of the hook is a work of fiction or a fictional character, the hook must involve the real world in some way. Works of fiction are bounded only by human creativity, making possible all manner of hooks that would be interesting if they were real – but if everything is special, nothing is. Simply acknowledging that a hook is about a work of fiction is not sufficient.

The bolded article should generally be the main or at least a major factor in the hook; avoid hooks that are primarily about an incident the subject is only tangentially related to.

Formatting

Every hook that appears at DYK follows the same basic format: an asterisk for the bullet point list, followed by a space, followed by three dots, followed by another space, followed by a hook that ends in a question mark. The text of most hooks begin with "that":

* ... that '''[[milk]]''' can come from cows?

Every eligible article in the hook should be linked and wrapped in bold markup '''. Markup should go on the outside of the link if possible.

Correct: '''[[milk]]'''

Incorrect: [[milk|'''milk''']]

Correct: '''''[[The West Wing]]'''''

Incorrect: '''[[The West Wing|''The West Wing'']]'''

Correct: '''[[Jon Stewart's 2004 apperance on Crossfire|Jon Stewart's 2004 appearance on ''Crossfire'']]'''

Lead hooks should contain a media marker, usually after the bolded article, signifying the connection to the shown piece of media. For an image, this is usually (pictured), but this marker can be moved or edited depending on exactly what is being shown. Note that the italics sit outside the hook:

Correct: ''(pictured)''

Incorrect: (''pictured'')

The hook cannot exceed 200 prose characters. Counting starts from after the space following the three dots, and ends at the question mark. For articles with multiple boldlinks, only text in the the first boldlink counts toward the limit. The eleven characters in a (pictured) tag do count, but any modifying text does not.

The hook should contain {{lang}} and {{transl}} tags for non-English and transliterated text, respectively, unless the text is in common English usage. The hook should not contain redlinks, external links, redirects, or links to disambiguation pages. It should also not contain parentheses – with the exception of the media marker – unless absolutely avoidable. There should not be a space before the question mark, but if the text directly preceding it is italicized, the {{-?}} tag can offset it.

If the hook uses a possessive apostrophe after the qualifying article, use {{`}} or {{`s}} to keep the bold text and the apostrophe distinct. Use the slightly different templates {{'}} or {{'s}} for italics:

Incorrect: '''[[milk]]''''s → milk's

Incorrect: '''[[milk]]'''{{'s}} → milk's

Correct: '''[[milk]]'''{{`s}} → milk's

Correct: '''[[cow]]s'''{{`}} → cows'

Incorrect: '''''[[The West Wing]]''''''s → The West Wing's

Incorrect: '''''[[The West Wing]]'''''{{`s}} → The West Wing's

Correct: '''''[[The West Wing]]'''''{{'s}} → The West Wing's

Promoting an article

Special occasion requests

Articles intended to be held for special occasion dates should be nominated as normal, with a note left for the reviewers detailing the request. The nomination should be made at least one week prior to the occasion date, to allow time for reviews and promotions through the prep and queue sets, but not more than six weeks in advance. The reviewer must approve the special occasion request, but prep builders and admins are not bound by the reviewer's approval. Exceptions to the six-week limit can be implemented by way of a local consensus at WT:DYK.

The hook should not put emphasis on a commercial release date of the article subject, but simply listing a hook on a specific date does not, in and of itself, make a hook promotional.

Occasionally, DYK will run thematic sets; these cannot be put together on a whim, and novel thematic sets must be approved at WT:DYK. Hooks collected for April Fools' Day (April 1) are an exception to the six-week requirement. Thematic sets are normally assembled for International Women's Day (March 8) and Christmas (December 25), but the six-week limit still applies.