Portal talk:Trains/Did you know candidates
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Improving the DYK process[edit]
Ping: Andy Dingley
After I posted the daily Did You Know item to the portal on Sunday, June 16, regarding an item from the SNCF BB 13000 article, the editor who did the most work on that article appears to have been displeased that there was no notification on the article's talk page before the entry was added to the portal. This resulted in a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Is nothing safe from DYK? I replied there (and openly invited further discussion here where it is most appropriate) with the process that I currently use to select facts for inclusion in this section. Since there have been no suggestions from any other editors for items to include in this section since August 28, 2016, it was again up to me to select a new item for inclusion. The article in question just happened to be next on the list of articles that I looked at in Category:C-Class rail transport articles to consider as a candidate. I selected a fact that I thought was interesting and that might get more people to read and perhaps to contribute to that article.
There are two process suggestions that I can glean from the discussion at WT:DYK. First would be to add a template to the talk page of an article when it is being considered for inclusion in P:Trains/DYK. Second would be to ask editors who have been most heavily involved in said articles' history for their suggestions on what to include. As it is now, I think both of these suggestions would add a great amount of time (on the order of days or maybe even weeks) to the process of selecting and adding facts to the DYK section. The current process is long enough that I can make a reasonable read of the article that I select and short enough that I can complete it on a daily basis in the time I have for Wikipedia editing in the early morning every day. I use only facts for DYK entries that are included in the selected article. Granted, my definition of an interesting fact can be very different from what another editor thinks is interesting. Note that the selection process was never intended to highlight only what makes the article subject important, just something interesting from it to hopefully get other editors to read and contribute to the article as well.
The candidates page has been available for editors to add suggestions to since June 2005, and it is clearly and directly linked from the portal DYK section. The candidates page lays out the steps to suggest an article for inclusion and also notes what to also include if the section is updated by any other editor.
One way that the candidate notification could work, however, is if I work ahead by one day. Rather than picking the article to highlight on the same day that it is listed, I could copy the previous day's entry from the candidates page to the portal DYK section and add the next entry to the candidates page to be copied the next day. As you can see in the candidates page history, there have been times that I put a fact there for inclusion at a later date, so that part of the suggestion is pretty easy. For this suggested process addition, we would need some kind of template notification, as was mentioned in the WT:DYK discussion, that there is a candidate on the P:Trains/DYK candidates page. For consistency with the current tracking process, I would suggest an additional parameter for {{WikiProject Trains}}, perhaps |DYKc= or similar, that would add a notification to the portal box on the banner template. As an admin, I can easily make this kind of parameter addition to the banner template. However, I fear that this process addition would require the candidate notification to be in place for more than a day because other editors do not edit every day like I try to do, so we would have to build up a list of candidates, perhaps as many as 6 to 10 items long to give enough lead time for comments on the candidates. Ultimately, based on my experience in editing the portal since its inception, I don't foresee that many other editors (other than he who started this discussion) would want to participate and it would still be solely up to me to make the edits in the end.
This could happen. But without further input, the process will not change, because it is simple and it has been in use for 14 years. What say you? Slambo (Speak) 00:39, 18 June 2019 (UTC)