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



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

This post has been edited by chrisoff: Sat 14th May 2011, 12:27am

[Casliber]

Errr, DYK ain't restricted to new articles, but 5x expansion of oldies and now 2x expansion of unreferenced BLPs too (unsure of how many of them are nommed). I made a subpage to note more obvious broader articles that could easily be 5x expanded. There are a few.....
Cas

[radek]

Errr, DYK ain't restricted to new articles, but 5x expansion of oldies and now 2x expansion of unreferenced BLPs too (unsure of how many of them are nommed). I made a subpage to note more obvious broader articles that could easily be 5x expanded. There are a few.....
Cas

I wasn't aware of the 2x BLP thing, it's new.

But the 5x expansion for all practical purposes means that it's all about new articles (and expanding short stubs is essentially creating new articles). There's no way in the world that an article like "Poverty" (or some of the ones Eric listed) can be expanded 5 times over, or even 2 times over. text expansion=/quality improvement , at least not past a certain point, and dyk should take that into account.

At one point I tried to actually do a 5x expansion on Gilbert Hernandez (because there ain't enough GOOD pop culture stuff on Wikipedia). Initially the article was at 1417 characters, which means it would have to wound up at 7000+ characters. After extensive research and pretty much looking through everything that was available out there, short of interviewing the guy myself, I could manage only 3845 characters. It's a notable topic. It's an interesting topic. But there's no way that you can write more than 4000 characters on it at this point. Which means that unless it's "new" it can never be a DYK, despite the huge improvement in it.

If you want a more serious example then I recall that Jmabel had a similar problem with some Portuguese explorers (the articles are now FAs I believe). There I helped him bitch and whine (by me, he was very polite about it), until the DYK regulars relented and let him have the DYK. But it took some trouble stirring.

Also somebody tried to do it with Captain Beefheart (or was it the Elevators?) - same problem.

This post has been edited by radek: Mon 16th May 2011, 9:06pm