Looking through a list of recent DYKs , I found lots of red-links:

Did you know....
*25 February:....... that squire Richard Cooke shot dead two tax collectors as he claimed that they were poachers?
*18 February:... that according to folklore, The Shoe Dog howled mournfully outside any dwelling that would soon suffer a bereavement?
*10 February: ... that the Ham font was believed to cure sick infants and young children who were close to death?
*9 February: ... that anyone who sees the Dancing Hare is said to have good fortune for the rest of their days?

It was discussed at AN/I..unsurprisingly, it seems a sockmaster is behind it (Hmm; one sock was named "Handel Publishing")

It was also noted that it resembled this hoax last year.

Now, does anyone here feel like telling us something?

..or shall we wait until the blogs handel, eh, handle it?

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(WP:AN/I600 seems to have a bug in it (?) Try: "45: Possible hoax account")

I have to say, all of my DYK were built around highly notable poems and poetry related topics that lacked pages, and I had plenty of highly reliable sources (Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc, as publishers). However, I was the clear exception. Look at the hall of fame for DYK and compare my additions to anyone else's. You will see a large discrepancy.

I tried to turn around DYK standards, did major source checks, etc. I also ran quite a few of them through AfD and the such. My reward was quite a lot of grief.

If DYK is going to continue to be a venue only for newly created (or 5x expanded, but that really only happens with stubs and amounts to the same) articles, then it's going to be full of junk and hoaxes. The big articles like Spain or Gravity were written almost ten years ago, and the stuff that is getting added now is all entirely marginal.

I would think a hook about Spain or Gravity would be rather boring to be honest.

Now, there are many famous works of traditional literature that have a lot of interesting things to say about them that are missing pages. I still have prep work for about 87 of those pages sitting around and plans to fill in about 300 more this year, but that would be delayed.

Go fill in pages about various nobility. There are a lot missing and there are tons of sources. You'd be surprised what weird things many of them got into. Lots of potential.

I keep saying that and keep asking where the 5x requirement comes from (as far as I can tell, only from the fact that having "5 days old" and "5 times expanded" had a certain aesthetic numerical symmetry to it or something) but all I'm getting in response is "This has been proposed before and the consensus was to reject it" - without ever being told why (or provided with diffs).


Recently someone nominated their expansion of Captain Beefheart for DYK. You have to go back to December to see the previous version, but anyway, they seriously improved it, sourced it and expanded it ... somewhat. The damned thing started out at 21K characters. They brought it up to 46K (2x expansion). But for it to be DYKable under current rules it'd have to be expanded to 105K characters.

Now, as much as I like the Captain, I don't think there's any reason what so ever for his Wikipedia article to be that long. Even the current 46K is probably too long.

A step in the right direction would be to:
1. Lower expansion requirement to x4
2. Lower expansion requirement to x3 for articles that start at more than 5000 characters
3. Raise the overall character requirement to at least 2500 characters (rather than 1500)

But nah, "we've always done it this way", "if it was good enough for our grandfathers, it's good enough for us" etc.

Typical Wiki rule inertia

(Edit: Not to mention that there's probably quite a number of articles that would be seriously improved by a good dose of cutting of text. See my previous example of Wyandanch, New York)

Oh yes, I have never in my whole life heard anything interesting about Spain.......

Who cares about "various nobility"?



Eh. Here's what I think. DYK should be refactored into a way to help improve the quality of Wikipedia's content. How? Instead of filling it up with irrelevant new articles, DYK should feature a mix of articles. There are normally, what 8 hooks on the main page? Half of those (4) should be used to highlight articles that are going through GAN,FAC, or peer review. Wikipedia's feeble attempts at quality control suffer from a dearth of reviewers, so DYK should be used to pull more eyeballs onto those articles, and hopefully draw more reviewers. 2 of the slots should be reserved to highlight genuinely interesting new articles that are of relatively high quality. Reducing the number of these by 75% would allow DYK to show much better stuff. The final 2 slots should go to articles on subjects of major importance that are currently of very low quality, hoping to bring in new editors and rapidly improve those articles.

I've blogged about this. See How to make DYK useful. Personally, I think these are dynamite ideas, and I encourage those of you who are Wikipedians to suggest them if you agree.

Well, that's why I said "step in the right direction" not "the ultimate goal". I like the idea of tying DYK to the FA/GA process though that would make DYK a completely different beast. So that maybe a complementary idea to reforming DYK rather than reform itself - cut the number of featured articles in DYK and OTD to 6 or 5 (and up the standards for length and sources for these to reduce # of noms to account for this) and use the space saved on the Main page for something like "Currently Under Review" section.

I'm also not sure that exposing an article through DYK to more eyeballs results in much improvement. It results in more readers but most of them are passive. In my experience, what improvements take place while the article is up (or even when it's nominated) mostly come from DYK reviewers (who despite their insistence on status quo in the rules do a really good job vetting, proofreading and copy editing many of the noms, the recent hoax being a fluke IMO).

And oh yeah, DYKing an article also has a not too infrequent consequence of pulling out ones "enemies" out of the woodwork - maybe that's just my idiosyncratic experience though. Even the Nazi-Soviet Parade which got 30K+ views when featured mostly just brought out the POV pushers.

You do DYK to get readers (let's be honest here), not to get improvements. For getting improvements nothing beats just going around people's talk pages and bugging them till they help.

Well, there are two issues here: one is about DYKs in general, (adressed above.) The other issue is: why are people doing this? It must have taken quite a few hours just to make these fake DYKs, why? Just to show that the system can be gamed? (As if anyone was in doubt) Is it only part of a breaching experiment?

For me, when I read this, I am reminded of Performance art (T-H-L-K-D) ...Perhaps someone will decide that wikipedia will be the next scene, or stage, for Conceptual art (T-H-L-K-D).

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The reason to make a fake DYK or other fake article, on a hoax subject, is to demonstrate how easy it is to insert plausible but entirely fictional material into this purported "encyclopedia". That it was about a mythical hare or baptismal font is only to minimize harm to those duped by it.

The real danger is that someone inserts a fake article concerning how crushed daffodil petals can cure cancer, how megadoses of Vitamin A alleviates acne, or the fact that some obscure Florida professor is actually a jihadist. (NOTE: NONE OF THOSE ARE TRUE).

Real harm could come from any of these things, and not in a vague, misinformational way, but in illness, death, or false imprisonment. And all of them are not only possible on Wikipedia, but take place every day.

On a less direct and more insidious level, you have articles like that on Muhammad al-Durrah (T-H-L-K-D), the poor child caught in the cross-fire in Palestine. That article, now about an "incident", elevates to pseudo-encyclopedic status the lunatic-fringe theory that the poor kid wasn't even killed. The page on Flat Earth (T-H-L-K-D) can only raise its muster enough to say "Although the hypothesis of the flat Earth has long been generally dismissed, there are still occasional modern advocates of the hypothesis." Wikipedia is what it is in large part because it is such an attractive vehicle for the spreading of partisan half- and un-truths by nationalists, religious zealots, anti-science types, and small minds of all kinds.

I dare say that the hope of these experiments is that some of them eventually get picked up by the general media, even if in the "isn't that funny" category, and inform people that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, even though it pretends to be one. Some here, like Awbrey, think this is a waste of time. I do not.

Byron.



Applause.

Is it overly bizarre of me to expect a bit of buggery among the British peerage?
Or is it somewhat more than a bit?

Me three. While the most famous Lord Byron enjoys considerable detail in his pseudo-cyclo article , some of the other gentlemen to bear that title are less well served.

In fact, go through this list. Hundreds of peers are linked through those titles, but very few of them get an article much longer than a poor stub.

And meanwhile, you can learn all you could possibly want to know about all the Soul Reapers in the Bleach series.