User:Calmer Waters/DYK...From Hook to Main Page

After working at Did you Know regularly, you will notice many mistakes which tie-up hook nominations, slowing down their progression to the main page. In some instances, these mistakes will cause the nomination to be declined.

It is because of this, I have provided an indepth step-by-step instruction on how to nominate an article, submit an eligible hook, verifing another editors nomination, promoting a hook to a preparation area, and finally moving a set of hooks both manually and with use of admin tools in a queue.

This is to be used as a reference to new DYK contributers, admin-candidates, and new admins with limited experience in this field.

The hook

The hook is the selling point for getting readers to view the article you are nominating. The following will assist you in getting your nomination approved and keeping your submissions from failing DYK eligibility.

• Make it interesting! Find a fact within the article that is sourced that would be appealing to a large number of readers.

• Make sure the fact presented in the hook is also in the article.

• Ensure it is less than 200 characters in length. The hook itself should be concise (fewer than about 200 characters, including spaces).

• Hooks which focus on negative aspects of living individuals should be avoided.

• Ensure all included wikilinks within the hook are direct links and not redirects or disambiguation pages.

• The hook must be mentioned in the article and cited with an inline citation since inline citations are used to support specific statements in an article. Sometimes the information contained within a paragraph is referenced by a single source. This in return causes the cite to be placed at the end of the paragraph. As this is acceptible for the article itself, for DYK it would also need to be cited directlty after the hook.

• Many times editors will suggest an alternate hook for your entry. Please check back often and provide feedback both on any concerns raised and opinions on alternative hooks offered.

The article

New

The article must be new to be featured in DYK. Current consensus states that a new article is one that is no more than 5 days old and may not consist of text spun off from a pre-existing article. There are two types of new articles:

• A newly created article either created on the main space or developed in a user's sanbox and moved onto the main space.

• A article in which the prose has been 5x expanded within the last five days. This includes stubs, redirects, and other short articles.

Note The content with which the article has been expanded must be new content, not text copied from other articles.

Length

There is also a length requirement to be featured on DYK. The lenght of prose can be checked by using the DYK check tool in the next section by adding the script provided to your monobook.

• A newly created article must have a mimimum of 1500 characters of prose (ignoring infoboxes, categories, references, lists, tables etc.)

• A newly created list must also contain a minimum 1500 characters of prose. This can be attainable by focusing on the header describing the features in the list.

• An article can also be determained to be too short if it does not adequately cover the topic of the article. This means that it should not be a stub class article. Failure satisfy this requirement may result in a decline of the nomination at the discretion of the selecting reviewers and administrators.

Hook

The fact presented in the hook must be contained in the article. This fact also must to have an inline citation placed directly after the end of the sentence containing the hook's fact. It can not be placed only at the end of the paragraph containing the hook. In addition, the article in general should also use inline, cited sources. Many reviewers will decline promoting a nomination based on lack of inline citations (this does not include the plot portion of an article).

No bare URLs

The article should have the references listed in expanded form. Bare URLs are often declined, due to leaving an unfinished look to an article. Articles with good references and citations are preferred. These sources should be properly labeled; that is, not under an "External links" header. Uncited articles are not likely to be chosen.

Example of a bare URL:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview2

Example of the same references expanded:

Armitstead, Claire (2008-05-03). "On yer vélo: Claire Armitstead takes a tour round France with the Ondaatje prizewinner". Guardian News and Media. Retrieved 2009-11-04.

Neutral

The article dealing with living individuals are reviewed according to policies on BLPs and carefully checked to ensure that no unsourced or poorly sourced negative material is included. Articles and hooks which focus unduly on negative aspects of living individuals should be avoided.

DYK check

DYK check is a very helpful tool to evaluate both the creation date or date of expansion of an article. It also will automatically calculate the number of prose within an article. This can be used to both check the length of your article and to assist in the verification of others. This also haves the added ability to see whether an article has been moved recently from the user space to the main space.

To insert the tool go to your monobook.js file and insert the following code:

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

Verifying other editors nominations

Any editor who was not involved in writing,expanding, or nominating an article may review it by checking to see that the article meets all the DYK criteria shown above.

Hooks can be tagged with 5 possible assessment results.

{{subst:DYKtick}} - No problems, ready for DYK

Using this tag shows other editors that the hook is ready for promotion to the main page and no potental issues are present.

This is used after the inline reference has been verified, along with date of the article's creation or expansion, and the required length. No issues present themselves with either the hook or associated article. Hook is approprately wiki-linked, title of article featured is bolded, and sourced have been verified as belonging to reliable sources.

{{subst:DYKtickAGF}} - Article is ready for DYK, with a foreign-language or offline hook reference accepted in good faith.

This tag is the same as the above tag except is used when the hooked source is either offline (ex. book, journal, newspaper) or a foreign language web site. This is assuming good faith (AGF) of the source.

{{subst:DYK?}} - DYK eligibility requires that an issue be addressed.

This tag is to be used when an issue with either the hook or article is present. This should be used accompned with an explanation of what needs to be addressed or clarified. Also the following template needs to be posted to the nominators talk page:

{{subst:DYKproblem|Article|header=yes|sig=yes}}

{{subst:DYK?no}} - DYK eligibility requires additional work.

This tag is to be used when a major issue with the nomination exist and must be addressed before promotion can take place. The most often examples for this would be prose that currently does not meet the minimum length requirement. This would also include major issues with the article or hook such as a negative point-of-view of a living individual in a hook or copy-right issues with an article. This tag should be accompanied with an explanation of what needs to be addressed. Also the following template needs to be posted to the nominators talk page:

{{subst:DYKproblem|Article|header=yes|sig=yes}}

{{subst:DYKno}} - Article is either completely ineligible, or else requires considerable work before becoming eligible

This tag is used when the article has failed for consideration for DYK. Reasons would include articles that have not been expanded to the minium leagth requirements within 5 days of creation. Also nomination that have not addressed issues within an acceptible amount of time should also be tagged.

Note Please do not automatically delete a nomination without tagging it first. It should instead be reviewed by a second pair of eyes before removal and deletion.

Compiling Prep areas 1 and 2

For a hook to go from a nomination to the main page it must first be moved into one of the the two preparation areas. You do not have to be an administrator to promote a hook and prepare a queue. These are a few rules and tips to hip compile a balanced and well prepared queue.

• First, it is highly discouraged to promote your own article and is prohibited if it has not been checked off by another editor. No worries, another editor will promote it at a later time.

• Only choose approved hooks ( or ). This means that an editor has already reviewed the hook for an issues and has stated that it is ready for promotion.

• At this time each update should have 8 hooks within each prep area.

• Balance the types of hooks. Attempt to include a variety of different hooks (countries, people, events, items, plants, animals, etc ....)

• Roughly half of the hooks should be baised on US topics. This should be based on the amount of US based hooks availible currently on the suggestion page.

• Suffle the hooks around so that similiar hooks are seperated from one another (two bio hooks sperated with a hook on an event, or two US hooks seperated by a Europeon related hook.

• If using a sad or depressing hook try to place a funny or uplifting hook next to it.

• Hooks on the Suggestions page that include images often get verified first. Users sometimes then just go and grab a bunch of the nearest verified hooks for the preparation areas, which can often include several of these verified picture hooks. Not every submitted picture can be featured in the picture slot of course, but since only one picture can be featured per update, try to leave the good picture hooks behind for another update if you possibly can.

• Attempt to place at least one funny or quirky hook if there is one available in the last (bottom) slot of the update. Ending on an upbeat or quirky note rounds an update off nicely and encourages readers to come back next time for more.

• Don't be afraid to ruthlessly 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. We don't want our readers to work hard, we want to make reading the DYK section as accessible and enjoyable an experience as possible! In general, the shorter and punchier the hook, the more impact it has. As it says on the Suggestions page, the 200 character limit is an outside limit not a recommended length—the ideal length is probably no more than about 150–160 chars. 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.

• Please disambiguate linked words in the suggestion. Here is the Wikipedia guideline.

• Each hook must begin with <no wiki>{{{1}}} </no wiki> that is already provided on the preparation area pages.

• After adding an entry to a preparation area page, remove it from the suggestions page. Make sure to include the article name, date, nominator, and creator under the "Credits" section to allow others to return it if a dispute arises.