Wikipedia:Did you know/Guidelines

To some extent, DYK approval is a subjective process. No amount of studying rules, almost-rules, and precedents will guarantee approval; nor will violating any rule 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 days old" limit can be extended for a day or two upon request.

An article is ineligible for DYK if it has previously 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, appeared as a boldlink at In the news (ITN) or in the prose section of Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries (OTD), or as Today's featured article (TFA). 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, you could still potentially nominate when it gets promoted to a good article.

Length

Articles featured at DYK must exceed 1500 bytes 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 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.

The hook fact in the article should be cited no later than the end of the sentence in which it appears. If a part of the hook fact appears multiple times, including across multiple boldlinked articles, only one of those fragments need conform to this rule. However, if the whole of the hook fact is split over multiple parts of an article, each of those parts should be assessed separately, citing each one at the end of the line in which it appears.

Articles should be neutral, verifiable, and free of copyright violations, including close paraphrasing. All content subject to the policy on biographies of living persons must conform with it.

Presentability

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

The article is likely to be rejected for unresolved edit-warring or the presence of dispute tags. (Removing the tags without consensus does not count.) A list can be found at WP:DISPUTETAG. An orphan tag is not a dispute tag. Articles nominated for deletion must go on hold until they have survived the deletion process. If an article otherwise qualifies for DYK, it is not a stub, and any stub tag should be removed before promotion.

Promoting an article

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.