User:Theleekycauldron/guide to prep set building

Under the surface,

I feel berserk as a tightrope walker in a three-ring circus...

— Luisa Madrigal (Jessica Darrow), from Encanto's "Surface Pressure"

So! You want to start out at the prep sets of DYK. It will be grueling. it will be demanding. It will take every ounce of your strength, your skill, your drive, your vision, your customer ser—

psst...

What?

leek, it's literally just copy/pasting hooks into a set...

But I wanted to impress the seriousn—

it's really not that difficult

But it's important for—

will you stop inventing fake voices for dialogue and just get on with this?

Fine. yeesh, what a killjoy. As I'm sure you already know, after a nomination is approved by a reviewer, it is moved from the unapproved nominations page (WP:DYKN) to the approved nominations page (WP:DYKNA). After that, "prep set builders" will select approved hooks from DYKNA and transfer them to Template:Did you know/Queue (specifically, the prep sets), where it will eventually make its way to Template:Did you know (the Main Page). So, we'll give an overview of the common pitfalls, as well as a lot of the minutiae that comes up when prep-building. Don't get daunted by the amount of instructions here; I didn't know all of this when I started out, and this is a lot of conventional wisdom that comes from months of experience at building and getting dinged and making mistakes. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, it's okay to be wrong. This is intended to be a reference, a complete set of things you might stumble across when prep building. All you really need to get started is Template talk:Did you know/Approved#How to promote an accepted hook and Wikipedia:Did you know/Preparation areas.

Things you want to check for in approving a hook

Do you need to promote this hook?

1. I hate to start with the basic basics, but you probably shouldn't promote a hook if there isn't an open slot for it (or if it doesn't work well with the balance of the prep set; we'll get to that later).
2. The bottom prep set is usually left empty—sometimes, hooks will get bumped from their slots for balance or errors or whatever else. In that case, those hooks will be moved to the bottom prep set, so some prefer that it's left open so we always have room to bump (because otherwise, we have to send already-promoted hooks back to DYKNA, and promotion is kind of a pain to undo and redo).
3. Consider taking a quick stop by the special occasion holding area (at the bottom of WP:DYKNA, or at WP:SOHA) to promote any hooks that need to be scheduled into this particular prep set first. I always forget to do this, so there's a two-month-long discussion in trying to get the SOHA moved from the bottom of DYKNA to the top.

Make sure it's really good to go

Sign at the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant (100 pixels wide)

1. First, you'll want to quickly skim through the nom page—make sure the reviewer(s) hit all the major points that are required in a full review.
   1. If the nomination has outstanding issues, skip it for now. If it looks like the conversation has stalled, ping some of the people involved who might be able to fix it. You may also want to consider adding a or in your message.
   2. If any changes have been made to the article since the last substantial review of its content (which is probably going to be the original reviewer's message), you'll need to check for any modifications of the article from that date.
      1. If you find any, make sure that they are sourced, neutral, and plagiarism-free.
2. Make sure the hook is cited in the article, at the end of the sentence.
   1. The information doesn't have to be contained all in one sentence, but anywhere that a part of the hook fact shows up should be cited at the end of that sentence.
   2. If the hook fact appears multiple times, such as once in the lead or once in the body, a body citation is fine.
   3. If the hook isn't cited, and you don't know which reference to use:
      1. The nominator might've given the hook's source in the nomination page—look for any sources, links, or citation templates that might give a clue as to which source you want
      2. If you're really drawing a whole blank, ping the nominator with a message on the nompage, asking them to cite the hook inline before you promote.
3. Make sure the hook is actually interesting and hooky (if it is, skip this section):
   1. Lots of nominators will take any old fact out of an article they create, expand, or get to GA because they made a new article and it's great and they want people to see their work.
   2. However, their hooks aren't always... fantastic, and while we do have a generally low bar for what might be interesting to a broad audience, there are some hooks that just are not good enough for the main page—and like pornography, you know it when you see it.
   3. While it's usually unwise to reject a nomination wholesale because the hooks don't work, there are ways you can get around this. If a hook just needs minor modifications or rewording, you can generally make those modifications unilaterally—I'll get to that later.
   4. Usually, the best thing to do is to come up with a new hook—you want to be constructive, not destructive. Go through the article, maybe go through the sources, try to find something interesting and unusual that might serve as a good alternate hook (ALT). Gently propose it on the nom page (I generally phrase it as "maybe there's room for a better hook", rather than "let's ... not do this one"), coax the nominator and reviewer into accepting it, and when another promoter comes along, they'll probably take your hook instead of the originals.
   5. If you absolutely can't find an ALT, you can ping someone else to see if they can't think of anything or ask the nominator/reviewer to see if they can come up with another ALT. If no one can think of something better (and there's general consensus from outsiders that the original hook probably shouldn't be ran), you may want to gently euthanize the nomination.
   6. Be careful when doing this with the long, long time regulars—it's often more trouble than it's worth to haggle, as they already know why it's interesting to them. There are nominators who just do not mind when their hooks are, while interesting, devoid of hookiness.
   7. If the hook is interesting and hooky to the point of quirkiness, you'll probably want to save it for the final slot—we generally reserve that slot for quirkier or sillier hooks.
4. If the nomination has an image that you want to use (if it doesn't, skip this section):
   1. Make sure the reviewer has approved the image—reviewers often forget to do that
   2. Make sure the image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100 pixels across.
5. If the hook is reserved for a special occasion,
6. If you happen across any other issues that the reviewer may have missed, or something you think should be cleared up before the hook hits the main page, leave a note, ping the nominator (and possibly reviewer), and wait while that's resolved. Again, you may want to consider returning the nomination to DYKN if the issues are not resolved in a timely manner.

How to actually promote a hook

seven minute video demonstration, if you're so inclined :)

1. I usually like to splitscreen when I'm building a prep set; One side for WP:DYKNA, the other side for the prep set.
2. Essentially, there are going to be up to three moving parts here from the nomination to the prep set. They are:
   1. The hook: it starts from the ellipsis (...) and ends at the question mark (?). Something like: ... that leeks are better than celery?
   2. The credits: it'll look something like * {{DYKmake|Leek|Theleekycauldron|subpage=Leek}}. These are generated automatically on the nomination page when a nomination is created, although they are sometimes and there will sometimes be multiple credits if multiple people participated in the hook's creation and nomination. A {{DYKmake}} credit is for anyone who participated in creating, expanding, or getting the article to GA status—a {{DYKnom}} credit is awarded to the nominator if they did not significantly contribute to the article (if they did contribute, they get a DYKmake credit).
   3. The image file (if you're putting it in the image slot): it'll be {{main page image/DYK|image=leek.jpg|caption=A leek}}
3. Those parts are going to move from the nomination to the prep set of your choice, like so:
   1. Find an open hook spot that works balance-wise (we'll get to that in a sec). A normal blank hook line looks like * ... that ... in source mode. Copy the hook from the nomination page to the blank hook slot in the prep sets. It should, in total, read something like: * ... that '''[[leek]]s''' are better than celery? Notice the preserved asterisk at the beginning, since DYK sets are bullet-point lists.
      1. If the hook is reserved for a special occasion, add a hidden note explaining thus (include the date it's reserved for!)
   2. Find the corresponding slot in the credits. A blank credit slot will look something like: * {{DYKmake|Example|Editor|subpage=Example}}, and it'll be under the "Credits" section below the hooks and preview section. Copy and paste all of the credit information from the nomination page to the prep set, replacing just one blank credit (replace both the blank DYKmake and DYKnom credit at the bottom if you're promoting the quirky hook).
   3. Likewise, a blank image will look like this: {{main page image/DYK|image=example-serious.jpg|caption=Caption goes here}}. You're gonna want to copy/paste the image,
4. If you think the hook needs modification (e.g. wording changes, formatting corrections, removing extraneous details), you can make those in the prep set once you've copy/pasted the hook. If the changes are relatively superficial, you'll want to leave a note in your edit summary (i'll explain below).
5. Once you're done with copy/pasting the hook and creating your edit summary, click "Show preview". Make sure everything looks right; If it does, hold off on publishing the edit, m
6. Closing the nomination page:
   1. Substitute the nomination template by changing the top line of {{DYKsubpage to {{subst:DYKsubpage.
   2. Change the DYKsubpage parameter passed to yes, replacing the comment.
   3. At the bottom of the page (but just above the line that says }}<!--Please do not write below this line or remove this line. Place comments above this line.-->), write To [[T:DYK/Pn]], where n is the prep set you moved the hook to (numbered 1–7).
      1. I also like to use this space to signal which hook i used, if i modified the hook, or if i decided not to use the image. For example, a hook where I took ALT1 to P5, modified it, and chose not to use the image, would read Modified ALT1 to [[T:DYK/P5]] without image.
   4. Copy/paste the blurb you put at the bottom to your edit summary, and click "Show preview".
      1. If everything is against a pale blue background, you're good!
      2. If that is not the case, something is likely screwing with the {{DYKsubpage}} template. Most commonly, someone blatantly ignored the comment that says Please do not write below this line or remove this line. Place comments above this line., meaning that you have to move that thing back to the bottom. Sometimes, there's a more annoying template-screwery at play, in which case you'll have to figure you what's causing the blue background to stop short prematurely on your own. There's an extra or misplaced }} somewhere you must seek out.
   5. Publish both edits; hallelujah! you've promoted a hook!

Balancing

Intra-prep set balancing

1. The most set-in-stone rules are that two hooks related to the same country should not be placed next to each other. Same goes for two hooks where a biography is a bolded article. Functionally, this means that you should have no more than 4 U.S. hooks and/or 4 biographies in one prep set.
   1. Sometimes, it's going to be less than four, too; After you've been at this for a while, you start to notice trends in the number of certain types of hooks (e.g. U.S. and bio hooks), the way you start to see patterns in your shower tiles after playing so much Tetris that your family starts to wonder if they raised Punxsutawney Phil. Prep sets should reflect, on a small scale, the balance of the hooks that are currently available for use. If you're starting to notice that it's hard to find 4, 5, 6 non-bios or non-U.S. hooks to put in prep sets, try and minimize usage of those hooks. If you have 8 hooks about Germany, and 80 approved hooks to choose from, there's no reason to use more than 2 Germany hooks in an eight-hook prep set.
2. Now, I am white, so my ability to talk about spice is limited. However, variety is indeed the spice of life. So, try not to use two hooks about singers (particularly operatic singers) in a single set, try not to include two hooks about U.S. politics in a single set, etc.—mix it up!
3. Like I said above, the last hook usually tends to be a "quirky" hook, which induces some mirth, confusion, or rule-twisting thingamajigerry. Some of my favourite quirky hooks are: (Did you know...)
   1. ... that the manufacturers of Hedgehog Flavour Crisps were taken to court under the Trade Descriptions Act as they did not contain actual hedgehog?
   2. ... that John Oliver was sued for defamation after a man in a squirrel costume told a coal industry CEO to "eat shit" on his show? my first DYK :)
   3. ... that?

Inter-prep set balancing (images)

In general, you don't want to use too many biographical images, or building images, or too many of any kind of image in a row. In general, a nice balance is 1 bio for every 2 non-bios, but again, a finger on the pulse of DYKNA can help these kinds of decisions. I also try to make an effort to promote more women or people of colour to the bio-image slot, given Wikipedia's gender and race gaps in article creation. To each their own, of course.

Conclusion

That's all I've got for you! Again, keep in mind that you don't have to keep this all in mind at once; a lot of this becomes second nature when you get after it for a while. You'll drive yourself insane if you try to remember all of this at once, but I hope it's a useful way to get you oriented, and something to fall back on when you need. Don't be scared; you're going to be great at this. Have fun :D cheers! theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/she) 10:08, 1 January 2022 (UTC)