"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

Seems like there's at least one thing we can agree on.

DYK is good for giving the dumbass children something to work toward that's easier than an FA.

If you'd like to know the biggest DYK whores, check the hall of fame.

Oh looky, Ottava keeps popping up.

Not whores.

Whores get paid real money and the best deliver delight in a creative fashion.


DYK is more like elementary kids getting their gold stars on the homeroom wall next to their name after they make macaroni art.

Not really. With DYK you get main space exposure which means a lot more people read your articles. Which is really what motivates a lot of editors.

Anyway, on this one I disagree with Hans, though I usually agree with him. Not that there isn't some truth to it. Yeah, a lot of of those DYKs I'd consider boring too. But De gustibus non est disputandum and all that. I'm sure lots of folks consider topics which I find fascinating to be totally boring too. There might be some there which really are boring in some absolute, platonic, sense but there's still plenty of interesting stuff. And I think empirical data would support it - if readers really found them boring and were conditioned to ignore them, then they wouldn't get a huge views boost.

I also disagree with the DYK vs. GA thing. Some topics are important, but just not broad enough for a GA sized article. It's not an either/or kind of thing, they both have their place.

The problem with DYK though, in a way, is that it has been TOO successful, hence some people churning out these things factory style. Rather than incentivizing the creation of ever more new articles, DYK should be altered to promote "most improved" articles.

That's a stupid observation. Not very article on Wikipedia SHOULD BE an FA.

If you get over 1,000 hits and an edit or two, you're lucky these days. Only noobs are motivated by the "exposure"--because everyone else knows six hours (or is it eight now?) amidst a hundred other links is totally a lot of exposure.



It's a correct observation, if you look at all the children writing DYKs to become an administrator these days. (Actually, most of them can't be arsed to write more than one before running--see Logan's current RfA.

Also, I never said every article SHOULD BE an FA. I simply said that DYK is for kids who want to have "article writing" or "content work" experience to level up and show off, but are too stupid to be able to write FAs. Seriously--other than Juliancolton and maybe one or two other child editors, how many of Wikipedia's under-18 group have one or two DYKs but no FAs?

Well, to be honest, I haven't had time to spend much time at DYK recently so maybe it degenerated to the point you describe. 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?

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!!






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

Jimbo and Blofeld are twats.



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?

I don't think any of my DYKs were on topics that could really be accused of recentism. *checks*

Nope. But I think that's because all of my DYK credits and most of the articles I edit are about subjects and not events. The only DYK that would be somewhat attributed to recentism is the Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative, because it was in a Wikileaks leak. But the article itself was created at least a month after the leak, so it wasn't really recent at that point.

Another benefit is that the sourcing standards are higher for DYK articles than they are for regular articles - if for no other reasons then that there actually ARE sourcing standards and somebody (at least in theory) checks them. Of course it's not GA or FA but it is a fairly simple and straightforward way of making at least some new articles have sources in'em.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that a lot of these DYKs on "obscure" topics are hella better written and sourced then a lot of old articles on "major" topics.

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.

Hey, Marek, I supported your initiative in that. It would lead to higher quality articles with better sourcing. 1500 characters is really short if you think about it.

The comment of Jimbo's quoted above isn't in disagreement with my comments. Nothing about what makes DYK potentially beneficial for Wikipedia would be significantly impaired by allowing DYKs to refer to articles that are not strictly "new".

What Wikipedia should do is decide how many DYKs per week they'll run, allocate them out in some way between the various topic areas, and allow each topic area's editorial board to select its DYK items. (Yes, I know, Wikipedia has no editorial boards. I'm talking about how they should do it.) What they'll actually do, of course, is create some "committee" that promotes items based on the political connectedness of proponents (the exact same trajectory we have already seen for both FA and GA). Another example of how Wikipedia's lack of functional leadership bites it in the ass.

It's not a leadership issue, Kelly. Your proposal is just too complicated for their peabrains to understand.



Well, sourcing's improved recently, although I do remember a certain breaching experiment a while back...

A Wikipedia paradox, is the whole "obscure article quality" point. You'd think that Travel (T-H-L-K-D) would be better-referenced than, oh, I don't know ... Gropecunt Lane (T-H-L-K-D). But it's not.

One of the main things with the example you mention, "Travel", is that it's generally just seen as a generic word. It's rather hard to find proper sources and figure out the right organization for such an article.

Such effort is one that is seldomly taken because it is not a topic that would be of personal interest to someone so they would put forth the effort.

Oh hell no. Your fellow Wikipedians don't care about "boring" subjects, of the type one might find in a real encyclopedia. Like travel. Or river. Or sewing.

But they sure as hell love to talk about My Little Pony.
They evidently consider Klingons to be a critical subject.
And they feel no encyclopedia should be without massive amounts of information about Babylon 5.
Or Kirby. Or Wyandanch.

Exactly. Articles on things people would be interested in working on are obviously better. The only reason why regular encyclopedias have entries on "boring" topics such as the ones you mentioned is because people are being paid to make them.

Presumably, contributors to regular encyclopedias are paid. However, equally importantly, these contributors are selected to be mature, responsible, properly educated people. They're a very different demographic from the bulk of WP editors, so they have very different interests. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them like say physical geography so much that they enjoy writing about rivers.

Well, I don't think it's technically a paradox since it's just a natural outcome of the incentive structure. Which is why I think the process should be expanded, even transformed, to promote "most improved" articles rather than new ones.

Aside from the mind-blowingly awesome Wyandanch article, too a large extent this is a problem of the demand-side not the supply side. Sadly, this is probably what people want to read. Or to state it differently, the problem is that many Wikipedia editors are drawn primarily from the same demographic as Wikipedia readers.

Another "big" topic that has a horrible article is Poverty - I mean, it tries, but you can totally see the serious writer vs. the "this is how poverty makes me feel" 16 year olds vs. I got some ideological agenda to push, in the fault lines of the article.

Well, anything with "cunt" in it is going to do well. Anything with a sexual ref will do well and get lots of attention.

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

Actually that one wasn't a DYK (because as we all know Malleus is not one of the "DYK children" who writes about pop culture sensationalist topics)

And if you look at the DYKs that got more than 5000+ views when they were up you pretty much get:

1. Cute animal doing cute things. Also football/world cup.
2. War (this one is actually a source of puzzlement to all the DYK regulars)
3. War (on this one Russavia actually cheated by having it featured on DYK and then OTD to get lots of hits. Technically it shouldn't be on the list)
4. War/morbidity
5. Disease/morbidity
6. War/morbidity
7. Food (Bacon)
8. Current politics
9. Cute animals doing cute things.
10. Current politics
11. War
12. First pop culture one - and it's James Bond not MLP
13. Sort of war. Well, it's Bolsheviks. Sort of crime.
14. Curious invention
15. Football, but it's really a form of morbidity too
16. Sex/pop culture - first one
17. War
18. Food (candy) and current politics
19. Geography
20. War (dis one's mine)
21. Sports
22. Geography/mythology
23. Cute animals doing cute things
24. Morbidity/geography
25. Cute animals doing cute things
26. Cute animals doing cute things
27. War/morbidity
28. (not so) cute animals
29. Current politics (another strange one)
30. Weird animals being weird
31. Religion
32. Crime
33. Space exploration
34. Curious invention
35. Weird animals, science, space stuff

So there's really only one sex related article there. It's hard to say for sure without knowing the the rate of nomination of sex related articles but this looks like an entirely "encyclopedic" list.

Obviously war and morbidity do really well, with cute animals doing cute things being up there too.
Let's see if I can make this a 5x expansion.

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.

The old "general topic, hard to write about" argument is logically flawed. It's quite simple to write about these topics. What's hard is figuring out how to organize the information. Wikipedians are too lazy to read through so sources.

Writing at any level of generality requires a command of the subject.




Radek, do you have access to the 'Book Club' section?

Well, considering that Wikipedia editors have twice as many Ph. D holders than in the general public, you would think that there would be more than enough people with a command of various subjects that could bring their talent, knowledge, and experience to bear.

The issue is the amount of interest in a specific topic. Even though i'm a biology major, that doesn't mean i'm going to be all that interested in working on the article on, say, Life (T-H-L-K-D). (Though that article is actually pretty good.)

You stumbled into an essential fact: Wikipedia is edited by and for arrogant young males.
And what do arrogant young males like most? War, sports, violence, death, etc. (And bacon.)
Everybody loves cute animals , so I guess you could call that "manly".

Support.

Laziness.



Biology, eh? What did they teach you about about the furry anatomy in college?

It's like a violin.

Do I even want to know what you mean by that?

The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

People, please! This is about DYK! The cycle of violins must stop!

So is the general public everyone who isn't a WP editor?

And are you saying that two thirds of all people with PhDs edit WP? How would anyone know?

Well, I have a PhD holder but not a PhD. It's made of acid-free parchment.

I'll bet that "fact" was established through a carefully-executed survey that featured an impeccable sampling design that minimized self-selection and other biases of data collection.

And the evidence was not based on self-report data but was verified by a neutral source! Remember Essjay. Can't just ask editors with no verification.

Probably not.

Personally, I thought it was more like a kazoo.




Stick with me, kid...I can get you hooked up with some lovely skanks.

Heh, and I'd also be interested in the amount of PhD's among "banned Wikipedia editors". Anyway, some topic areas probably do. Most don't. And even if this is true in aggregate I am sure that it's driven by just a few select areas, while rest of Wikipedia still sucks.

And as I've said before, it's really the "professional grad student" that is the source of the biggest problems as the Arrogance/Competence ratio pretty much peaks in grad school (at least wrt to the lay public - in relations with your thesis advisor it's probably the Butt Kissing/Competence ratio that peaks and in fact the two phenomenon are related, as one is a psychological over compensation for the other)

What's the book club section?

Clearly not. It's a forum for those interested in collecting material for a book on Wikipedia. I don't know why it is private, I'm sure there is a good reason.

"Self-selection"?! O! Perish the mere thought of it!

Maybe. I can't really complain since a lot of my articles are about war. The preponderance of war articles in DYK probably has as much to do with the fact that the MILTHIST project, and the people associated with it, are one of the more sane, efficient, and better functioning parts of Wikipedia. Though yeah, I also get bored with yet another article on yet another sub-sub-class of a sub-sub-type of a kind of a ship.