Is DYK a joke?, DYIK - a fast way to amass millions Options

[chrisoff]

"There is actually another problem there as well: DYK has become a factory for mainpage credits. There seems to be a large number of DYK junkies who mass-produce totally boring articles and put them through DYK. As a result, every single article currentrly gets only a few hours on DYK, and readers have been conditioned to ignore it entirely as it routinely breaks the promise of providing interesting information. Unfortunately, the lobby of DYK abusers has so far prevented reform. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=429004222

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/confused.gif)

For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dr._Blofeld

This post has been edited by chrisoff:

[chrisoff]

DYK is one of the few community practices in Wikipedia that makes sense. Of course people "game" it, but the gaming benefits the project, by getting lots of fairly innocuous articles written about topics that might not otherwise get written about. The grousing is coming from people who think that their writing is better than that of the other people they're competing with for DYK time, and thus it's unfair that these inferior authors get the same recognition that their obviously far great genius, and are thus cutting into their due recognition. It all makes sense when you remember that these authors are customers of Wikipedia, and remember just what it is they're buying from Wikipedia. From their point of view, this is nothing less than bait and switch.

But but Jimbo and Dr. Blofeld disagree!!

My own view, which I think I may have never expressed out loud before, is that it is no longer wise or useful to restrict DYK links on the front page to new articles. At one time, this may have been a good way to incentivize people to write new articles on interesting topics, now it may be leading to unnecessary recentism as well as limiting the scope of what ought to be one of our most amazing and charming front page features. -Jimbo

Maybe there should be a restriction against recentism then as DYKs, or at least stricter assessment of those related to current affairs. I have nothing against it in principal but what alarms we is how wikipedia is increasingly becoming a newspaper on many topics rather than an encyclopedia. . . . I believe we have to make bigger restrictions on the trend towards recentism on here. Wikipedia is NOT a newspaper . . . -Dr. Blofeld

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=429245852

[melloden]

DYK is one of the few community practices in Wikipedia that makes sense. Of course people "game" it, but the gaming benefits the project, by getting lots of fairly innocuous articles written about topics that might not otherwise get written about. The grousing is coming from people who think that their writing is better than that of the other people they're competing with for DYK time, and thus it's unfair that these inferior authors get the same recognition that their obviously far great genius, and are thus cutting into their due recognition. It all makes sense when you remember that these authors are customers of Wikipedia, and remember just what it is they're buying from Wikipedia. From their point of view, this is nothing less than bait and switch.

But but Jimbo and Dr. Blofeld disagree!!

Jimbo and Blofeld are twats.

But I do know there are several good editors who still throw their work up there and I'm mostly objecting to you lumping them in with "the children".

1K views ain't that bad all things considering. That's probably more than 900 more views than it would have gotten otherwise. Is this a "obscure topics" criticism?

I'm more saying that the children are ruining DYK, much like Kelly said about inferior writing and such.

I like obscure topics, but six hours of airtime is not nearly enough for them to get publicity. After all, what's the point of writing about an obscure topic if it'll only stay obscure for another hundred years?

[radek]

I'm more saying that the children are ruining DYK, much like Kelly said about inferior writing and such.

I like obscure topics, but six hours of airtime is not nearly enough for them to get publicity. After all, what's the point of writing about an obscure topic if it'll only stay obscure for another hundred years?

Gotcha. I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea of limiting the number of DYKs per day and so increasing the length of main page exposure and obviously this has to be done by setting some kind of higher standard. I would very much be opposed to having that standard be whether or not some reviewer thinks a particular nomination is "interesting enough" - since that's always gonna be in the eye of the beholder (and what "the people" will find interesting is fairly unpredictable)

In fact I've tried to get them to up the min length requirement to at least 2500 characters (from 1500) as well as think of a way of expanding the process to "most improved articles" rather than just new ones. But yeah, it fell on deaf ears.