DYK rules[]
DYK is not a general trivia section. DYK is only for articles that have been created, or expanded fivefold or more, within the last 7 days. Ideally, they should have been listed on "New Pages" during that time, but former redirects, stubs, or other short articles that have been greatly expanded are also encouraged (as a guideline, an expansion of fivefold or more is acceptable; the decision on whether an expanded article is appropriate for the template will depend on the updating administrator's judgment). For those workpages first developed in user space, the date the workpage is posted to article namespace may be counted as the first day towards the DYK 7 day rule.
Any user may nominate a DYK suggestion; self-nominations are permitted and encouraged.
Selection criteria[]
Four basic criteria are used to determine whether a nomination is eligible for DYK. Other criteria may arise as a result of community discussion or policy (more details appear at Wikipedia:Did you know/Additional rules), but the following four criteria account for most cases.
- New – A nominated article must be new.
- For purposes of DYK, a "new" article is no more than five days old. This does not include articles split from older articles.
- Former redirects, stubs, or other short articles in which the prose portion has been expanded fivefold or more within the last seven days are also acceptable as "new" articles. The content with which the article has been expanded must be new content, not text copied from other articles.
- Try to pick articles that are original to the Fossil Wiki and interesting to a wide audience.
- Articles that have appeared on the main page's In the News section are not eligible.
- Long enough – The article must be of sufficient length (ie. not a stub).
- Articles must have a minimum of 1,500 characters of prose (ignoring infoboxes, categories, references, lists, tables etc.)
- Lists: Proposed lists need 1,500+ characters of prose text. The listed items themselves are not counted as part of the 1,500 DYK qualifying characters.
- In practice, articles longer than 1,500 characters may still be rejected as too short, at the discretion of the selecting reviewers and administrators.
- The article must not be marked as a stub; DYK features no stubs.
- Neutral – Articles on living individuals are carefully checked to ensure that no unsourced or poorly sourced negative material is included. Articles and hooks which focus unduly on negative aspects of living individuals should be avoided.
Many submissions are made which fail to satisfy one or more of these points. Nominators should ensure that their submissions meet all these criteria or their submissions will fail DYK eligibility. Articles with good references and citations are preferred. These sources should be properly labelled; that is, not under an "External links" header. Uncited articles are not likely to be chosen.
Processing requests[]
An administrator will process and review your request as soon as possible. Since the Main Page is updated every Friday, your suggestion may not appear until the next Friday.
Requests[]
Place requests (ie. how they would appear on the Main Page) below here.