Wikipedia:Did you know/Onepage

Overview

Did you know... is a section you can see on the Main Page. Beginners should consult this Did You Know glossary if they don't understand any of the terms used. Beginners may like to start by looking at a summary of our many rules: this provides links to pages with more detailed explanations (which in turn may link to even more detailed pages).

Here are the ways you can help. The ways are listed in increasing order of the Did You Know experience that is required to do these jobs well. So beginners should choose from the top of the list. Statistics show most people who read this page don't click anything, but that wasn't the intent. Please choose from the list and read on; there's more.

• You can help proofread nominations.
• You can write a new article. But you might want to study the nomination process first or write your article in user space, or your article might be too old before it's ready.
• You can nominate a new article and write a Did You Know hook for it.
• You can approve or disapprove nominations.
• You can promote nominations to the preparation areas. Further instruction at How to promote a hook.

• Overview
• Nomination rules
  • Article length
  • Article sources
  • Rules specific to type
    • New article rules
    • Fivefold expansion
    • Calculating 5-fold
  • Hook rules
  • Images
  • Post nomination
• Proofreading
  • Update process
  • Approval
• See also

This one-page format of "Learning DYK" is designed to be a database for the proposal; this one is for printing.

Nomination rules

Four basic criteria are used to determine whether a nomination is eligible for DYK, together with a review requirement. Wikipedia:Did you know/Guidelines outlines all of the criteria that need to be met, but all DYK submissions must broadly meet these key points:

1. New – At the time of nomination, an article must be considered new, which means it was created, expanded fivefold, or promoted to good article status in the seven days preceding a nomination.
2. Long enough – The article must be at least 1500 characters of original prose, which includes only raw text and does not include markup.
3. Cited hook – The facts of the hook need to appear in the article with a citation no later than at the end of the sentences in which they appear.
4. Within policy – Articles for DYK must conform to Wikipedia's most important content policies, which include Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Copyright violations, and Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons.
5. Review requirement (QPQ) – If you have nominated five or more articles in the past, you must review one other nomination (unrelated to you) for every subsequent article you nominate‍—‌this is called quid pro quo or QPQ.

Article length

Articles featured at DYK must exceed 1500 characters 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 or articles with active nominations 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.

Article sources

Any editor may nominate new articles for Did You Know. Some new articles may be found at:

• User:AlexNewArtBot/GoodSearchResult – This is an automated list of promising new articles generated by AlexNewArtBot (talk · contribs · logs).
• List of new article announcement pages
• New pages
• You can nominate your own new article. This is called a "self-nom".

Rules specific to nom type

New article nominations

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-day limit can be extended for a day or two upon request.

An article is ineligible for DYK if it has in the past five years 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 or between nomination and appearance on the Main Page, appeared as a boldlink at In the news (ITN) or in the prose section of Selected anniversaries (OTD), or as Today's featured article (TFA). A nomination must go on hold if the article has pending nominations to appear at any of the same. 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, it can still be nominated if it gets listed as a good article.

A Useful Tool For Finding DYK Errors

If you have never submitted a Did You Know nomination before, you don't have to master DYKcheck. But maybe you should; DYKcheck automates prose character counting and some of our other rules, so you don't have to learn them. If you routinely approve hooks for others, you should install DYKcheck. If not, you can use DYKcheck without installing it. DYKcheck (or prosesizebytes, or prosesize, which give the same count) is the preferred method for counting characters in an article's prose, and usually carries the most weight at DYK, because it counts only the prose as defined by Did You Know rules, thus avoiding mistakes and providing an impartial settlement of disputed counting.

Counting prose characters without DYKcheck

You'll probably make a mistake trying to count this way, but you'll be close. Use a free website, or an external software program that has a character-counting feature. For example, if you are using Microsoft Word, select the text from the article page (or, in the case of "Did you know" nominations, the DYK talk page) – not the edit page containing Wikitext – then copy and paste it into a blank document. Delete everything DYKcheck doesn't count: infoboxes, categories, references, lists, tables, block quotes, headers, images and captions, the "See also" section if any, Table of Contents, edit buttons, "Citation needed" and similar superscripted text, and reference link numbers like [6]. Click "Tools" ("Review" in Office 2007), then "Word Count", and note the "Characters (with spaces)" figure. Other word processing programs may have a similar feature. For Mac users, Apple has a Word counter widget available for Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Note: The character counts indicated on "Revision history" pages are not accurate for DYK purposes as they include categories, infoboxes and similar text in articles, and comments and signatures in hooks on the suggestions page.

Using DYKcheck if you have a username

Copy and paste the following phrase:

importScript('User:Shubinator/DYKcheck.js'); //DYKcheck tool

to your common.js page and save it. If you don't have a common.js yet, it will be created when you click on the red link to the left. If you do have a common.js page, the link to the left will be blue. In that case, click on the blue link and add the phrase to your common.js page. If you only wish to add DYKCheck to one particular skin, then go to your skin.js page and put that line in it. There will be a scary warning about malware, but it hasn't hurt me any.

After saving, you have to bypass your browser's cache to see the changes. Mozilla/Safari: hold down Shift while clicking Reload (or press Ctrl-Shift-R), Internet Explorer: press Ctrl-F5, Opera/Konqueror: press F5. For other browsers, see Wikipedia:Bypass your cache.

If you are on a Wikipedia page that starts with Wikipedia:, User:, Talk:, or anything with ":", go to a normal page like Dog. You should then see the words "DYK check" on the left side of your screen, assuming you use the default Wikipedia:Preferences. Go to the page you want to check and click "DYK check". The "Prose size (text only)" figure is the figure used by Did You Know. The text actually counted is colored yellow. If DYKcheck finds errors, they will be listed at the top of the page and colored red. The DYKCheck can take several seconds to compile the conclusion so watch for that. A known bug is that the tool interprets uses of {{IPA}} and its deprecated derivatives as several hundred extra characters, so for 5x expansions, you may need to edit a pre-expansion version and Show preview after removing it.

Using DYKcheck without installing it

With or without a username, you can use the DYKcheck tool without installing it; just put this

javascript:importScript('User:Shubinator/DYKcheck.js'); dykCheck();

into your URL and hit Enter when you're viewing a mainspace page.

The above was fine at the time it was written, but it does not work for most modern browsers.

Here are instructions for a few popular PC browsers. In all cases, start out on the page you want DYKcheck to analyze, then enter the code importScript('User:Shubinator/DYKcheck.js'); dykCheck(); where directed below. The first time you do this may produce an error, but you can still click on "DYK check" in the sidebar under "Tools". Or you can enter the code again and it will work without having to click on "DYK check".

• Chrome or Edge: Ctrl ⇧ Shift j (on Mac, Command Option j) – enter code at the > (top of the page).
• Firefox: Ctrl ⇧ Shift i – enter code at the >> (bottom of the page).

Prosesize

Prosesize is similar to DYKcheck, but it only counts characters of prose without checking anything else, so it's a little bit faster. To install prosesize, go to the "Gadgets" tab of your Preferences; under "Browsing", check "Prosesize". When installed, the prosesize button is labeled "Page size".

More information about DYKcheck

See User:Shubinator/DYKcheck.

Fivefold expansion

F1: Former redirects, stubs, or other short articles in which the prose portion (not the whole article) has been expanded fivefold or more within the last seven days since nomination (well, not exactly), are acceptable as "new" articles. The content with which the article has been expanded must be new content, not text copied from other articles. For step-by-step guide on how to calculate whether the expansion is big enough and recent enough, see Wikipedia:Did you know/Supplementary guidelines#calculate 5x.

F2: Fivefold expansion means at least five times as much prose as the previously existing article – no matter how bad it was (copyvios are an exception), no matter whether you kept any of it, and no matter if it was up for deletion. 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.

F3: "Seven days old" means seven days old in article space. You may write your article on a user subpage and perfect it for months. The seven days start when you move it into article space. Such moves are often overlooked when enforcing the seven day rule, so we may need a reminder. But if you move the edit history along with the article, we might not believe you moved it, because it isn't obvious in the edit history.

F4: If some of the text was copied from another Wikipedia article, then it must be expanded fivefold as if the copied text had been a separate article.

F5: The age of the previously existing article used to calculate fivefold expansion depends on the date of the next version, not the date that version was created. Explanation here.

F6: The fivefold rule is controversial.

Calculating 5-fold DYK eligibility

G1: To calculate fivefold expansion since a specific day, which I will call July 18, 2008, for definiteness: 1. Count the characters in the prose-only portion of the current version. 2. On the article's history screen, click the latest time stamp before July 18, not the first time stamp for July 18. 3. Divide by the prose-only characters on that screen.

To explain the counter-intuitive step 2, I emphasize the difference between an edit's change, which you see by clicking "prev" on the history page, and an edit's result, which you see by clicking the time stamp on the history page. Although an edit's change and an edit's result are listed on the same line, the edit's change really comes between that edit's result and the previous edit's result. Similarly, an edit's result really comes between that edit's change and the next edit's change, even though an edit's change and an edit's result are shown on the same line.

Example. On January 1, 2006, a 100 character stub is created. At 1:00 on July 18, 2008, the 100 characters are expanded to 1000 characters. An hour later at 2:00 July 18, 2008, the article is further expanded to 2000 characters. When I say it that way, the expansion is clearly 20x (or equivalently, 95% new) and qualifies for Did You Know. But to count the 100 characters, they wouldn't be listed as 1:00 July 18. The 100 characters existed on July 18 before 1:00, but the 100 characters were the result of the previous edit. So you would have to click the 2006 edit to count the 100 characters, even though 2006 is much too old for Did You Know. If you made the mistake of clicking the first edit for July 18, you would get the result of that first edit and therefore miss the change of that edit, and count 1000 characters, resulting in 2x expansion and an unjust disqualification.

Multiple articles

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
Main Page errors	WP:ERRORS
To ping the DYK admins	{{DYK admins}}

For previous iterations of the DYK guidelines, see Wikipedia:Did you know and Wikipedia:Did you know/Supplementary guidelines.

This is a complete handbook of all of DYK's guidelines and standard practices. It is more helpful as a reference than a guide – if you're looking for a guide on how to do a specific job, see the reviewing, prep building, and admin instructions.

To some extent, DYK approval of a nomination is a subjective process. No amount of studying this page can guarantee approval, nor will violating any guideline or precedent 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-day limit can be extended for a day or two upon request.

An article is ineligible for DYK if it has in the past five years 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 or between nomination and appearance on the Main Page, appeared as a boldlink at In the news (ITN) or in the prose section of Selected anniversaries (OTD), or as Today's featured article (TFA). A nomination must go on hold if the article has pending nominations to appear at any of the same. 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, it can still be nominated if it gets listed as a good article.

Length

Articles featured at DYK must exceed 1500 characters 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 or articles with active nominations 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. No one is required to check that the article's citations generally back up its content, with the exception of the hook fact; however, any source-to-text integrity issues that are discovered need to rectified before approval.

Articles should be neutral, and free of copyright violations, including close paraphrasing and media copyright. All content subject to the policy on biographies of living persons must conform with it. Achieving good article status does not grant a pass for this section; DYK-specific verification is still required.

The facts of the hook in the article should be cited no later than the end of the sentence in which they appear. If a part of the hook fact appears multiple times, including across multiple boldlinked articles, citing at least one suffices. 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. This rule reduces the burden on volunteers by allowing the hook facts to be easily and quickly checked.

Presentability

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

The article should not be subject to unresolved edit-warring and should not deserve stub or dispute tags. Orphan tags and COI notices are not dispute tags. Articles nominated for deletion or merging must go on hold until the process has concluded.

Hooks

External policy compliance

The hook should include a fact that is unlikely to change prior to or during its run on the Main Page; citations in the article that are used to support the hook fact must verify the hook and be reliable. The wording of the article, hook, and source should all agree with each other with respect to who is providing the information – if the source is not willing to say the fact in its own voice, the hook should attribute back to the original source as well. Note that hooks with exceptional claims, such as 'the first X to do Y' hooks, require exceptional sourcing.

Hooks must adopt a neutral point of view. Hooks that unduly focus on negative aspects of living persons should be avoided. Note that this is a stricter requirement than BLP as a whole: a sentence that might be due weight in the article can become undue if used in the hook, as all of the surrounding context of the individual's wider life is missing.

Style

The hook should be likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by readers with no special knowledge or interest in the topic. Intriguing hooks 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.

Make sure to provide any necessary context for your hook; don't assume everyone worldwide is familiar with your subject. However, do keep hooks short and to the point.

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

Special considerations

If the subject of the hook is a creative work, the hook must be focused on a real-world fact. Creative works are bounded only by human imagination, 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 creative work is not sufficient, nor is adding an unrelated real-world fact to a hook which is otherwise about a creative element.

Articles and hooks featuring election candidates cannot appear on the main page in the 30 days prior to the election or while the polls are open, unless the hook is a "multi" that includes bolded links to new articles on all the main candidates. Approved nominations are to be held until after the polls have closed, after which they may be run.

Nominations about contentious topics may be subject to greater scrutiny from reviewers and promoters.

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 appearance 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 parentheses:

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, text in boldlinks after the first do not count toward the limit. The eleven characters in a (pictured) tag does not count, but any modifying text does.

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 must not contain redlinks, external links, redirects, or links to disambiguation pages. A boldlink next to a non-boldlink does not breach MOS:SEAOFBLUE, but any two non-boldlinks or two boldlinks must be kept separate. It should also not contain parentheses – with the exception of the media marker – unless absolutely unavoidable. 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: '''[[cookie]]s'''{{`}} → cookies'

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

Images

The first hook in the set on the main page must have an associated image or other piece of media. The media must be suitable, attractive, and interesting; images in particular must display well in the small size of the {{main page image/DYK}} template (140x140 pixels, adjusted for aspect ratio). The media must be freely licensed—fair-use images are not permitted on the Main Page. It must already be in the article (or a crop from an image already in the article, if necessary to maintain quality at small size); and it must be relevant to the article. Try to avoid images that divert readers from the bolded article into a side article – for example, taking a hook about a fictional character and picturing the character's also-linked portrayer. DYK wants to show readers its new and expanded content, and images can be detrimental to that purpose if not used carefully.

Reviewing a nomination

Mandatory reviews

See also: Wikipedia:Pay actions forward

If you have nominated five or more articles in the past, you must complete a full review of one other nomination (unrelated to you) for every subsequent article you nominate‍—‌this is called quid pro quo or QPQ. A review does not need to be successful to count as a QPQ. Where a nomination offers more than one new or expanded article, an article-for-article quid pro quo (QPQ) is required for each nominated article. As soon as a new nominator's hook includes articles beyond their fifth nomination of an article for DYK, each of those requires a separate QPQ review.

Your QPQ review should be made before or at the time of your nomination. A nomination which doesn't include a QPQ (and is not from an exempt nominator) may be closed as "incomplete" without warning. For help in learning the reviewing process, see the reviewers' guide. QPQs do not expire and may be used at any time for a future DYK nomination.

The community may also choose to activate an "unreviewed backlog mode"; while activated, editors who have nominated twenty or more articles are required to provide an extra QPQ for every new nomination until the backlog mode ends. The page history of Template:Did you know/Backlog mode? displays the activation periods.

Rules for reviewing

You're not allowed to approve your own hook or article, nor may you review an article if it's a recently listed good article that you either nominated or reviewed for GA (though you can still nominate it for DYK).

DYK novices are strongly discouraged from confirming articles that are subject to active arbitration remedies, as are editors active in those areas. Use common sense here, and avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. A valid DYK nomination will readily be confirmed by a neutral editor.

For an article to be considered approved, there must be at least one full review with respect to the DYK criteria, rather than a simple "check mark". Subsequent reviews in a nomination may rely on preceding reviews where the validity of the latter has not been disputed – however, only full reviews with no reliable predecessors count as a QPQ.

Timeout

Unpromoted nominations over two months old may be rejected at the discretion of reviewers and promoters.

Promoting a hook

Users are encouraged to help out by promoting hooks to the seven prep areas; you don't have to be an administrator. However, do not promote a hook you wrote, or a hook for an article you created, nominated, or reviewed. (Ask for assistance at WT:DYK if one of "your" hooks has been waiting a long time for promotion.) It is the promoter's responsibility to make sure all review issues have been resolved, that the hook is verified by sourcing within the article. The promoter acts as a secondary verification that the nomination was reviewed properly.

The accepted length of an update is a fixed number that changes on occasion, usually between six and ten hooks (currently nine). This is not an absolute rule, but it is the currently accepted standard length for an update, depending on page balance, so the items selected fit with whatever else is on the Main Page at that time.

Putting sets together

Variety is the spice of life, so mix your hooks up. No topic should comprise more than two of the hooks in a given update. When a hook covers two or more topics it counts toward the maximum for each. For example, an eight-hook update can contain two hooks on fish and two on cooking, but an update with two hooks about cooking fish should not contain any other hooks related to fish or cooking. (The exceptions here are hooks related to the United States and biographies; it is generally acceptable to fill up to half a set with either (or both) of these.) If two hooks in a set have a shared topic or country, they should not be next to each other. Whenever possible, try to avoid including hooks about similar topics in consecutive sets. For example, if one set has a hook about cooking, try not to include a hook about cooking in the following set. Also try to avoid having two images of people in adjacent sets.

Consider picking an upbeat, funny, or quirky hook – if there is one available – and putting it in the bottom slot of the set. Just as serious news programs end on an upbeat note to bring viewers back next time, ending on an upbeat or quirky note rounds out an update nicely and encourages readers to come back next time for more. This is a recommendation rather than a hard rule; sets are not required to have a quirky hook, and a set can run without one if no such hooks are available. Note that quirky hooks still need to meet the regular guidelines on sourcing and accuracy: quality and truthfulness should not be sacrificed for the sake of being quirky.

There will frequently be a need for empty prep slots, in case a hook needs to be bumped or delayed. A good rule of thumb is to leave half of the bottom prep empty: the first slot (image), the last slot (quirky), and two middle slots.

Quality control

Concerns about approved hooks can be brought to WT:DYK at any point in the process by any editor. Doing so as early as possible in the process is valuable to detecting and addressing potential concerns. Best practices when doing so is to ping the nominator, reviewer, and promoter, all of whom can be found on the hook's nomination template, which is also transcluded on the target (bolded) article's talk page.

Bold post-promotion edits to hooks are allowed only from promoters and uninvolved editors, in order to tighten up compliance with WP:DYKHOOKSTYLE. While you should be careful not to introduce new facts that require independent verification, don't be afraid to trim hooks of extraneous information and clauses. A lot of people who submit hooks tend to overestimate the amount of information that is required, but the end result is a hook that has too much information and is difficult to process. In general, the shorter and punchier the hook, the more impact it has. The 200-character limit is an outside limit, not a recommended length—the ideal length is probably no more than about 150–160 characters. Note however that some hooks cannot be reduced in length without losing essential information, so don't assume that every hook that is 200 characters long requires trimming.

During and after promotion to prep, any change beyond an absolutely obvious correction warrants a ping to the nominator by including [[User:NomUserName]] in the edit summary. Note that templates such as {{ping}} or {{u}} don't work to generate pings in edit summaries.

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.

Update frequency

DYK runs a certain number of sets per day, depending on the backlog size. Currently, we update DYK once every 24 hours. If we are at one set per day and immediately after the midnight (UTC) update finishes there are more than 120 approved nominations with six filled queues, we rotate to two sets per day, and rotate back to one set per day immediately after the midnight (UTC) update three days later. The approved nominations page has a maximum size limit, so it will sometimes not display or count the latest nominations.

Instructions for effecting the switch are at WP:DYKAI § Switching update interval. Admins planning to make a switch should alert the DYK community by posting their intentions to WT:DYK in advance.

Notes

What articles not to shoot for 5-fold DYK

K1: 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.

Hooks

External policy compliance

The hook should include a fact that is unlikely to change prior to or during its run on the Main Page; citations in the article that are used to support the hook fact must verify the hook and be reliable. The wording of the article, hook, and source should all agree with each other with respect to who is providing the information – if the source is not willing to say the fact in its own voice, the hook should attribute back to the original source as well. Note that hooks with exceptional claims, such as 'the first X to do Y' hooks, require exceptional sourcing.

Hooks must adopt a neutral point of view. Hooks that unduly focus on negative aspects of living persons should be avoided. Note that this is a stricter requirement than BLP as a whole: a sentence that might be due weight in the article can become undue if used in the hook, as all of the surrounding context of the individual's wider life is missing.

Style

The hook should be likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by readers with no special knowledge or interest in the topic. Intriguing hooks 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.

Make sure to provide any necessary context for your hook; don't assume everyone worldwide is familiar with your subject. However, do keep hooks short and to the point.

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

Special considerations

If the subject of the hook is a creative work, the hook must be focused on a real-world fact. Creative works are bounded only by human imagination, 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 creative work is not sufficient, nor is adding an unrelated real-world fact to a hook which is otherwise about a creative element.

Articles and hooks featuring election candidates cannot appear on the main page in the 30 days prior to the election or while the polls are open, unless the hook is a "multi" that includes bolded links to new articles on all the main candidates. Approved nominations are to be held until after the polls have closed, after which they may be run.

Nominations about contentious topics may be subject to greater scrutiny from reviewers and promoters.

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 appearance 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 parentheses:

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, text in boldlinks after the first do not count toward the limit. The eleven characters in a (pictured) tag does not count, but any modifying text does.

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 must not contain redlinks, external links, redirects, or links to disambiguation pages. A boldlink next to a non-boldlink does not breach MOS:SEAOFBLUE, but any two non-boldlinks or two boldlinks must be kept separate. It should also not contain parentheses – with the exception of the media marker – unless absolutely unavoidable. 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: '''[[cookie]]s'''{{`}} → cookies'

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

Images

The first hook in the set on the main page must have an associated image or other piece of media. The media must be suitable, attractive, and interesting; images in particular must display well in the small size of the {{main page image/DYK}} template (140x140 pixels, adjusted for aspect ratio). The media must be freely licensed—fair-use images are not permitted on the Main Page. It must already be in the article (or a crop from an image already in the article, if necessary to maintain quality at small size); and it must be relevant to the article. Try to avoid images that divert readers from the bolded article into a side article – for example, taking a hook about a fictional character and picturing the character's also-linked portrayer. DYK wants to show readers its new and expanded content, and images can be detrimental to that purpose if not used carefully.

Post nomination

Objections to your nomination

A1: Hooks are subject without notice to copyediting as they move to the Main Page. The nature of the DYK process makes it impractical to consult users over every such edit. Also, watch your nomination's subpage to ensure that no issues have been raised about your hook, because if you do not respond to issues raised your hook may not be featured at all.

Patience

A2: If there is no response, please bear with us: we won't reject the hook unless someone has raised an unsatisfied objection, even if it has reached the Template talk:Did you know#Older nominations section, according to this. Or if the hook has been approved, we are especially unlikely to delete the hook until it goes on to a preparation area for the Main Page. Other hooks listed in the same section as your hook are also waiting, and scrolling to the bottom of the page gives you an idea of how much longer to wait, as described at Daily headings on the suggestions page.

A3: If you can't find the hook you submitted on the suggestions page, in most cases it means your article has been approved and is in the queues or preparation areas for display on the Main Page. You can check whether your hook has been moved to the queue by reviewing the queue listings. You can also check the Main Page, and check the archives (where it goes after being on the Main Page).

A4: If your hook is not in any of the queues or preparation areas, not already on the Main Page, and not in the archives, it has probably been rejected. Nominations can be rejected if the hook is very old and has unresolved issues for which any discussion has gone stale. If you think your hook has been unfairly rejected, you can query its rejection on the discussion page, but as a general rule rejected hooks will only be restored in exceptional circumstances. So be sure to satisfy any objections to your nomination before that happens.

Proofreading

This page is about proofreading hooks, although proofreading articles is also helpful. Only a few thousand people will look at a Did You Know article during its twenty-four hours of fame – but almost a million people will load the Main Page during that time, including the hooks, although most people don't really look at the hooks. Source http://stats.grok.se/ . One Main Page misspelling or comma can change the world more than you realize.

Places to look for mistakes

• Template talk:Did you know, whether hooks on that page have been approved yet or not. Even if the hook is rejected, it's a good idea to fix typos as you find them, because the reason for rejecting the hook might be corrected in the future. The rest of this page is mostly about proofreading here at Template talk:Did you know, but you can also proofread the following:
• The seven preparation areas (1 2 3 4 5 6 7)
• The seven queues (1 2 3 4 5 6 7)
• Template:Did you know, on the Main Page. You need to be an administrator to change it directly. Otherwise, suggest corrections at WP:ERRORS#Errors in Did you know?. Some prefer to proofread Did You Know as it appears on the Main Page, so they won't miss any changes others make during preparation (described here). But that means the public is exposed to errors until they are reported and fixed. Also, if everyone wants to make their contribution last, then who would be first?
• Don't forget image captions; they can have typos too. Usually the images on Template talk:Did you know don't have captions yet, but at the preparation areas and beyond, they do.

Proofreading Template talk:Did you know

If you find proofreading mistakes at Template talk:Did you know, first decide if your change is big, little, or in between. In general, changing a couple words without changing the intended meaning is a little change. If an entry sounds as if English isn't the author's native language, then changing several words can be considered "little". For a little change, just change it; nobody really wants to know that you added a space after their three dots. For an in-between change, change it and then explain what you changed. For a big change, suggest a rewritten hook using an ALT. Look through the rest of the page to see how ALT's are formatted.

Remember to check ALT hooks in addition the the hook at the top, some of which occur in the middle of a paragraph full of comments. Just because an ALT isn't formalized as an ALT, doesn't mean someone can't copy it to a preparation area without noticing typos.

Hook proofreaders who are familiar with the rules of Wikipedia:Did you know/Nomination can ensure compliance with those rules. User:Shubinator/DYKcheck automates some of that process.

Specific errors to look for

Of course you should fix or question anything that's wrong, but here are some specific errors you can look for. Most of them are from our nomination rules, linked above. The search for many of these problems should be automated. See User:Art LaPella/Proposed Main Page proofreading bot, which was mostly written in 2007.

Search strings

Some routine proofreading errors can be found by searching the whole page for the following strings:

• "..t" to find a missing space after the three dots, which are called an ellipsis. Add the space. Note this trick only works if the hook begins with "that", "the" or some other word beginning with "t".
• " ?" to find a space before the question mark at the end of the first sentence (remove the space)
• "...." to find an ellipsis with more than three dots (remove all but three)
• "}.. " (that's a curly bracket and two periods) to find an ellipsis with only two dots (it needs three)
• "'.. " is a variation of "*.. " if AltN is used
• "}that" to find an ellipsis that is missing altogether
• "} that", "'that", "' that" are variations of "}that"
• "pictured) " (note the space) to find (pictured) or (object pictured) unitalicized. Our convention is to italicize that word or words when there is an image.
• "'')" (single quote, single quote, parenthesis) is a sign of italicizing "pictured" but forgetting to italicize the parentheses, according to J7

Errors typical of Did You Know

• the link to the article should be bold (sometimes the article link is missing altogether)
• the hook should end in a question mark (in case of a multi-sentence hook, the first sentence must end in a question mark, and User:Shubinator/DYKcheck can't automatically check the total hook length)
• hook length. If it's over the limit of about 200 characters including spaces, I link to User:Art LaPella/Long hook, combined with {{subst:DYK?no}} (which shows as ), to explain this problem. With practice, you can recognize a hook that's too long by how many lines it occupies on your screen, after mentally excluding wikitext that isn't counted.
• Don't capitalize the first word of the article title, just because it's capitalized in the title (unless it's a proper noun)
• Excluding Template talk:Did you know, the word (pictured) should be just after what is actually pictured – especially after the picture has been changed. Therefore, there should be one and only one word (pictured) in the entire list.
• Duplicate "that", duplicate ellipsis, duplicate question mark ... "that that" at a preparation area or beyond is especially common.
• Also, if you know all these rules, you can be alert to answer routine questions about those rules.

Errors you would proofread on any page

Remember, almost a million people will at least load this stuff, so routine proofreading is more important than on just any page.

• spelling
• grammar
• capitalization
• apostrophes
• MOS:NUM
• WP:DASH
• commas after phrases like "Cleveland, Ohio", "Paris, France", and "June 5, 2009" (see comma article), and around nonrestrictive appositive phrases
• correcting links to disambiguation pages according to this. User:Splarka/dabfinder.js helps find them. Another way to find short pages, which are usually disambiguation pages, is to click "preferences", "Misc", and then change the "stub link" number.
• italicize books, court cases, ships etc. as described at MOS:TITLE
• Wikilink unfamiliar words
• correct a missing space between a word and the wikilink symbols "[[" for the next word, or between "]]" and the next word

Update process

Approval

This page details step-by-step instructions on how reviewing is done. For rules of reviewing, see WP:DYKRR.

Within the context of DYK, reviewing refers specifically to the process by which a nominated hook and the associated article(s) are evaluated, improved, and eventually either rejected as irreparably unusable or approved. This page is intended as a guide to aid editors in the reviewing process.

Pick a nomination to review

Nominations are listed at Template talk:Did you know. On that page, the nominations are generally arranged in chronological order, with the oldest nominations at the top of the page. It's a good idea to focus on reviewing older nominations that haven't received any attention yet.

Review the article(s)

To qualify for DYK, an article needs to meet several special criteria, in addition to being checked for normal encyclopedic issues. You must check ...

1. ... that each boldlinked article is new enough.
2. ... that each boldlinked article is long enough. The DYKcheck tool is helpful in evaluating these first two.
3. ... that each boldlinked article is well-sourced, neutral, BLP-compliant, and copyvio-free.
   1. The Earwig tool can be helpful for detecting direct plagiarism, but it will not catch close paraphrasing and only checks certain types of sources; manual spot-checks should also be carried out.
   2. If the article is entirely or substantially sourced to offline, foreign-language or paywalled sources, verify the basic facts, or at the very least, the existence of the article subject.
4. ... that each boldlinked article is presentable.
5. ... that the hook is cited to a reliable source.
6. ... that the hook is short enough.
7. ... that the hook is interesting.
8. ... that any images are freely licensed, clear at a diminished size, and used in the article.
9. ... that each QPQ has been done, where necessary.
10. ... that there are no other, more subjective issues.

Finishing the review

Type your review in the section for that nomination – this can either be done manually, or with the {{DYK checklist}} or similar template.

If you are typing in your review manually, you should begin your review with one of the six review icons. This allows the nominator and other editors to more quickly understand your review decision, including the severity of any problems. It is also used by the bot to keep the tally of how many hooks have been passed. After posting the icon, indicate all aspects of the article that you have reviewed; your comment should look something like the following:

{{subst:DYK?}} Article length and age are fine, no copyvio or plagiarism concerns, reliable sources are used. But the hook needs to be shortened.

Be sure to give a thorough explanation of any problems or concerns you have, since several other editors may comment on the nomination before you return.

Symbol	Code	Status	Description
	{{subst:DYKtick}} {{subst:DYKyes}}	Approved	No problems, ready for DYK
	{{subst:DYKtickAGF}}	Approved	Article is ready for DYK, with a foreign-language, offline or paywalled hook reference accepted in good faith
	{{subst:DYK?}}	Query	DYK eligibility requires that an issue be addressed. Notify nominator with {{subst:DYKproblem|Article|header=yes|sig=yes}}
	{{subst:DYK?no}}	Maybe	DYK eligibility requires additional work. Notify nominator with {{subst:DYKproblem|Article|header=yes|sig=yes}}
	{{subst:DYKno}}	Rejected	Article is either completely ineligible or otherwise requires an insurmountable amount of work before becoming eligible.
	{{subst:DYK?again}}	New review	Requesting a second opinion or fresh review

An article cannot be officially promoted until a reviewer has given approval ( or ) to at least one of the article's hooks.

---

If the outcome of your review requires a response from the nominator, please consider notifying with them with a personal message or with {{subst:DYKproblem|Article|header=yes|sig=yes}}, replacing Article with the title of the nominated article. This will automatically create a new talk page section and will automatically append your signature, so there is no need to do either of those.

An article cannot be officially promoted until a reviewer has given their approval ( or ) to at least one of the article's hooks. Nominators are encouraged to work with reviewers to come up with hooks that meet the standards of the DYK process, and new alternate hooks can be proposed by anyone (nominator, reviewer, other third party) in an effort to produce at least one viable hook. Once a reviewer has conducted a thorough review of the nomination and given their approval by placing the requisite symbol on the discussion page along with a statement indicating which hooks are ready, and if no other reviewer subsequently disagrees with this assessment, an uninvolved editor will soon review the discussion and likely close it and promote the article.

Preparation areas

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
Main Page errors	WP:ERRORS
To ping the DYK admins	{{DYK admins}}

For previous iterations of the DYK guidelines, see Wikipedia:Did you know and Wikipedia:Did you know/Supplementary guidelines.

This is a complete handbook of all of DYK's guidelines and standard practices. It is more helpful as a reference than a guide – if you're looking for a guide on how to do a specific job, see the reviewing, prep building, and admin instructions.

To some extent, DYK approval of a nomination is a subjective process. No amount of studying this page can guarantee approval, nor will violating any guideline or precedent 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-day limit can be extended for a day or two upon request.

An article is ineligible for DYK if it has in the past five years 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 or between nomination and appearance on the Main Page, appeared as a boldlink at In the news (ITN) or in the prose section of Selected anniversaries (OTD), or as Today's featured article (TFA). A nomination must go on hold if the article has pending nominations to appear at any of the same. 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, it can still be nominated if it gets listed as a good article.

Length

Articles featured at DYK must exceed 1500 characters 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 or articles with active nominations 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. No one is required to check that the article's citations generally back up its content, with the exception of the hook fact; however, any source-to-text integrity issues that are discovered need to rectified before approval.

Articles should be neutral, and free of copyright violations, including close paraphrasing and media copyright. All content subject to the policy on biographies of living persons must conform with it. Achieving good article status does not grant a pass for this section; DYK-specific verification is still required.

The facts of the hook in the article should be cited no later than the end of the sentence in which they appear. If a part of the hook fact appears multiple times, including across multiple boldlinked articles, citing at least one suffices. 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. This rule reduces the burden on volunteers by allowing the hook facts to be easily and quickly checked.

Presentability

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

The article should not be subject to unresolved edit-warring and should not deserve stub or dispute tags. Orphan tags and COI notices are not dispute tags. Articles nominated for deletion or merging must go on hold until the process has concluded.

Hooks

External policy compliance

The hook should include a fact that is unlikely to change prior to or during its run on the Main Page; citations in the article that are used to support the hook fact must verify the hook and be reliable. The wording of the article, hook, and source should all agree with each other with respect to who is providing the information – if the source is not willing to say the fact in its own voice, the hook should attribute back to the original source as well. Note that hooks with exceptional claims, such as 'the first X to do Y' hooks, require exceptional sourcing.

Hooks must adopt a neutral point of view. Hooks that unduly focus on negative aspects of living persons should be avoided. Note that this is a stricter requirement than BLP as a whole: a sentence that might be due weight in the article can become undue if used in the hook, as all of the surrounding context of the individual's wider life is missing.

Style

The hook should be likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by readers with no special knowledge or interest in the topic. Intriguing hooks 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.

Make sure to provide any necessary context for your hook; don't assume everyone worldwide is familiar with your subject. However, do keep hooks short and to the point.

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

== Special considerations ==

If the subject of the hook is a creative work, the hook must be focused on a real-world fact. Creative works are bounded only by human imagination, 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 creative work is not sufficient, nor is adding an unrelated real-world fact to a hook which is otherwise about a creative element.

Articles and hooks featuring election candidates cannot appear on the main page in the 30 days prior to the election or while the polls are open, unless the hook is a "multi" that includes bolded links to new articles on all the main candidates. Approved nominations are to be held until after the polls have closed, after which they may be run.

Nominations about contentious topics may be subject to greater scrutiny from reviewers and promoters.

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 appearance 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 parentheses:

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, text in boldlinks after the first do not count toward the limit. The eleven characters in a (pictured) tag does not count, but any modifying text does.

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 must not contain redlinks, external links, redirects, or links to disambiguation pages. A boldlink next to a non-boldlink does not breach MOS:SEAOFBLUE, but any two non-boldlinks or two boldlinks must be kept separate. It should also not contain parentheses – with the exception of the media marker – unless absolutely unavoidable. 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: '''[[cookie]]s'''{{`}} → cookies'

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

Images

The first hook in the set on the main page must have an associated image or other piece of media. The media must be suitable, attractive, and interesting; images in particular must display well in the small size of the {{main page image/DYK}} template (140x140 pixels, adjusted for aspect ratio). The media must be freely licensed—fair-use images are not permitted on the Main Page. It must already be in the article (or a crop from an image already in the article, if necessary to maintain quality at small size); and it must be relevant to the article. Try to avoid images that divert readers from the bolded article into a side article – for example, taking a hook about a fictional character and picturing the character's also-linked portrayer. DYK wants to show readers its new and expanded content, and images can be detrimental to that purpose if not used carefully.

Reviewing a nomination

Mandatory reviews

See also: Wikipedia:Pay actions forward

If you have nominated five or more articles in the past, you must complete a full review of one other nomination (unrelated to you) for every subsequent article you nominate‍—‌this is called quid pro quo or QPQ. A review does not need to be successful to count as a QPQ. Where a nomination offers more than one new or expanded article, an article-for-article quid pro quo (QPQ) is required for each nominated article. As soon as a new nominator's hook includes articles beyond their fifth nomination of an article for DYK, each of those requires a separate QPQ review.

Your QPQ review should be made before or at the time of your nomination. A nomination which doesn't include a QPQ (and is not from an exempt nominator) may be closed as "incomplete" without warning. For help in learning the reviewing process, see the reviewers' guide. QPQs do not expire and may be used at any time for a future DYK nomination.

The community may also choose to activate an "unreviewed backlog mode"; while activated, editors who have nominated twenty or more articles are required to provide an extra QPQ for every new nomination until the backlog mode ends. The page history of Template:Did you know/Backlog mode? displays the activation periods.

Rules for reviewing

You're not allowed to approve your own hook or article, nor may you review an article if it's a recently listed good article that you either nominated or reviewed for GA (though you can still nominate it for DYK).

DYK novices are strongly discouraged from confirming articles that are subject to active arbitration remedies, as are editors active in those areas. Use common sense here, and avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. A valid DYK nomination will readily be confirmed by a neutral editor.

For an article to be considered approved, there must be at least one full review with respect to the DYK criteria, rather than a simple "check mark". Subsequent reviews in a nomination may rely on preceding reviews where the validity of the latter has not been disputed – however, only full reviews with no reliable predecessors count as a QPQ.

Timeout

Unpromoted nominations over two months old may be rejected at the discretion of reviewers and promoters.

Promoting a hook

Users are encouraged to help out by promoting hooks to the seven prep areas; you don't have to be an administrator. However, do not promote a hook you wrote, or a hook for an article you created, nominated, or reviewed. (Ask for assistance at WT:DYK if one of "your" hooks has been waiting a long time for promotion.) It is the promoter's responsibility to make sure all review issues have been resolved, that the hook is verified by sourcing within the article. The promoter acts as a secondary verification that the nomination was reviewed properly.

The accepted length of an update is a fixed number that changes on occasion, usually between six and ten hooks (currently nine). This is not an absolute rule, but it is the currently accepted standard length for an update, depending on page balance, so the items selected fit with whatever else is on the Main Page at that time.

Putting sets together

Variety is the spice of life, so mix your hooks up. No topic should comprise more than two of the hooks in a given update. When a hook covers two or more topics it counts toward the maximum for each. For example, an eight-hook update can contain two hooks on fish and two on cooking, but an update with two hooks about cooking fish should not contain any other hooks related to fish or cooking. (The exceptions here are hooks related to the United States and biographies; it is generally acceptable to fill up to half a set with either (or both) of these.) If two hooks in a set have a shared topic or country, they should not be next to each other. Whenever possible, try to avoid including hooks about similar topics in consecutive sets. For example, if one set has a hook about cooking, try not to include a hook about cooking in the following set. Also try to avoid having two images of people in adjacent sets.

Consider picking an upbeat, funny, or quirky hook – if there is one available – and putting it in the bottom slot of the set. Just as serious news programs end on an upbeat note to bring viewers back next time, ending on an upbeat or quirky note rounds out an update nicely and encourages readers to come back next time for more. This is a recommendation rather than a hard rule; sets are not required to have a quirky hook, and a set can run without one if no such hooks are available. Note that quirky hooks still need to meet the regular guidelines on sourcing and accuracy: quality and truthfulness should not be sacrificed for the sake of being quirky.

There will frequently be a need for empty prep slots, in case a hook needs to be bumped or delayed. A good rule of thumb is to leave half of the bottom prep empty: the first slot (image), the last slot (quirky), and two middle slots.

Quality control

Concerns about approved hooks can be brought to WT:DYK at any point in the process by any editor. Doing so as early as possible in the process is valuable to detecting and addressing potential concerns. Best practices when doing so is to ping the nominator, reviewer, and promoter, all of whom can be found on the hook's nomination template, which is also transcluded on the target (bolded) article's talk page.

Bold post-promotion edits to hooks are allowed only from promoters and uninvolved editors, in order to tighten up compliance with WP:DYKHOOKSTYLE. While you should be careful not to introduce new facts that require independent verification, don't be afraid to trim hooks of extraneous information and clauses. A lot of people who submit hooks tend to overestimate the amount of information that is required, but the end result is a hook that has too much information and is difficult to process. In general, the shorter and punchier the hook, the more impact it has. The 200-character limit is an outside limit, not a recommended length—the ideal length is probably no more than about 150–160 characters. Note however that some hooks cannot be reduced in length without losing essential information, so don't assume that every hook that is 200 characters long requires trimming.

During and after promotion to prep, any change beyond an absolutely obvious correction warrants a ping to the nominator by including [[User:NomUserName]] in the edit summary. Note that templates such as {{ping}} or {{u}} don't work to generate pings in edit summaries.

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.

Update frequency

DYK runs a certain number of sets per day, depending on the backlog size. Currently, we update DYK once every 24 hours. If we are at one set per day and immediately after the midnight (UTC) update finishes there are more than 120 approved nominations with six filled queues, we rotate to two sets per day, and rotate back to one set per day immediately after the midnight (UTC) update three days later. The approved nominations page has a maximum size limit, so it will sometimes not display or count the latest nominations.

Instructions for effecting the switch are at WP:DYKAI § Switching update interval. Admins planning to make a switch should alert the DYK community by posting their intentions to WT:DYK in advance.

Notes

See also

• Wikipedia:Did you know/Lore
• Wikipedia:Did you know/Glossary