How to Get Exposure for a New Wikipedia Article
“Did You Know?” Feature Spotlights Online Encyclopedia's Newest Info
Sep 15, 2009
Writing new articles on Wikipedia is both challenging and rewarding. The challenge comes from the growing trend to nominate incomplete articles for deletion, which has led many users to develop entries in their user space on Wikipedia. On the other hand, a new article containing interesting information may be listed on the site's main page if nominated for the “Did You Know?” section. New articles with at least 1,500 characters of prose, as well as older entries which have been expanded at least five times in the past five days, are eligible for the honor; up to 32 articles are featured each day, making it the easiest of the so-called “triple crown” achievements to complete.
Eligibility for DYK
The “Did You Know?” section, commonly abbreviated DYK, is open to new or recently expanded articles that are of sufficient length, have an interesting “hook” that is appealing to a wide variety of readers, and are free of most Wikipedia tags. Articles do not need to be comprehensive, but should not have empty sections or otherwise appear to be a work in progress. Specific criteria include:
- Article length: The minimum length is 1,500 characters for new articles, or a fivefold expansion for older pieces. The characters counted only include the prose itself; lists, tables, templates, and other characters are not included in the calculation.
- Newness: nominees must have been created or moved to the main article space within the past five days. Expanded articles must have had the full fivefold expansion added within the previous five days.
- Accuracy: nominated articles should not contradict an existing article or contain erroneous information.
- Verifiability: the “hook” for the nominated article must be referenced with an inline citation in the entry itself – that is, a footnote that details that exact secondary used for writing the hook itself.
- Tag-free: articles that have been tagged for problems such as being inaccurate, written from one point of view only, or being nominated for deletion cannot be used until the underlying issues are addressed.
DYK Nomination Process
Any Wikipedia editor may nominate an eligible article to be listed in the DYK section, and self-nominations by writers are encouraged. The nominator must write an engaging hook in the form of a question that begins with the phrase, “did you know?” Other editors may suggest alternate hooks, or edits to existing ones.
The DYK section is updated automatically four times per day from nominees that have been approved by the Wikipedia community based on the above criteria. Each article thus posted is given a notation on its “talk page” (the section where editors discuss ways to improve the article); similar notices are given to the nominating editor and any who contributed to writing the article itself.
Common Reasons for DYK Rejection
Although getting an article listed in the “Did You Know?” section is much easier than developing a featured article (one that serves an example of the best Wikipedia has to offer), there is still no guarantee that a nomination will be approved. Like most aspects of Wikipedia culture, the rules of the DYK process are considerably more complex than the overview presented here. Nevertheless, most rejected nominations fail for reasons which are relatively easy to understand:
- Article length: only the prose itself is counted towards the 1,500 characters or fivefold expansion. This includes spaces, but it doesn't include anything that isn't a sentence, including formatting codes and lists of items. More specifically, “Did You Know defines 'prose' to exclude infoboxes, categories, references, lists, tables, block quotes, headers, images and captions, the 'See also" section if any, Table of Contents, edit buttons, and reference link numbers like [6].”
- Article age: the five days is counted from when the article is introduced to the main article space, and practically speaking it's often difficult to complete such an entry in the time allotted. Many editors create or expand articles over time, and only move the changes when they're ready for review by the community.
- Completeness: this is a subjective criterion, but generally reviewing editors will give specific guidance for improvement if the article is not considered complete.
- Newness: the purpose of DYK is to feature new articles (including those which are at least 80% new), so the text must not be copied whole cloth from existing Wikipedia entries or other source
- Other rules of Wikipedia also apply, including the notability criteria and the requirement that information be presented from a neutral point of view.
The DYK process allows effective Wikipedia editors to get acknowledged for their work by highlighting the very reason they choose to write new articles in the first place: because some interesting aspect of human knowledge has not yet been covered by the online encyclopedia.
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