User:Agne27/DYK and rewrites

The Main Page feature of Did You Know... has been in a state of evolution ever since the first DYK on the pencil sharpener was featured in February, 2004. The goals of the DYK project is to highlight the creation of new content on Wikipedia and it has been one of the more public faces of Wikipedia's dramatic growth as an online encyclopedia. But the days of articles on pencil sharpeners becoming DYKs have long since past as the overall growth of Wikipedia slows. The entire culture of Wikipedia has changed with a dramatic shift from exploding quantity to emerging quality. The vetting of newly created articles includes not only the checks for obvious spam, vandalism and hoaxes but also includes a plastering of clean up tags pointing out the many quality deficiencies that new articles may have. Even the culture of DYK has changed with new articles having several layers of rules that explicitly prohibits the featuring of articles with clean up tags, non-hook related referencing issues, bare URLs among other things. As Wikipedia seeks to build upon its credibility as a valid information source, this overall evolution towards quality is only beneficial.

DYK's first evolution in response to the emerging emphasis on quality came with the allowance of "recently expanded" article to be nominated along side entirely new articles. Over time the vaguely defined "recently expanded" was more hammered down to the concept of 5x expansion which was later even more tightly defined on how exactly this expansion is calculated. One of the benefits of this change was that many forgotten stubs or small articles now provided a DYK incentive for editors to expand upon them. This not only contributed to the overall improvement of articles on Wikipedia but it is also gave some lift of improvement in the overall quality of articles featured in the DYK slot of the main page.

The low hanging fruit[edit]

As most of the "low hanging" fruit of encyclopedia articles have long since be created, the subject matter covered by DYK has become increasing more obscure. This has led to many discussions on the WT:DYK page about "boring" hooks/articles and repetition of certain topics. Additionally there are often calls to revamp DYK with suggestions such as including GA articles and other "non-new" articles frequently being suggested.

Five Fold discussions[edit]

Few topics have been more discussed and more contentious than the 5x expansion rule.

Proposal[edit]

The evolution towards accepting full fledged rewrites is on going.