User:Reidgreg/DYK

This page serves to list this user's Did You Know nominations and reviews, to track quid pro quo and achievements, and to provide useful links for reviewing.


 * 1) TAI Aksungur
 * 2) A Shakespearean Baseball Game
 * 3) Rinse the Blood Off My Toga
 * 4) The Precious Legacy
 * 5) Ivan Golunov
 * 6) Made in Canada
 * 7) Parliament Hill (theme set)
 * 8) McNally v R
 * 9) Holy door (Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela) (theme set)

DYK for Danzig Street shooting
00:36, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

This was my first article, my first GA, and my first DYK. It received 10,824 page views while it was on the main page on Friday 25 May 2018. This was the 13th most-viewed hook for May 2018 and the 7th most-viewed non-lead hook (i.e.: without an accompanying picture) for that month.

DYK for 2010–2017 Toronto serial homicides & Death of Alloura Wells & Murder of Tess Richey
00:02, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I'd planned to promote this through In the news but for BLP reasons they weren't likely to cover it until there was a conviction (see below). The DYK I had originally prepared was "... that landscaper Bruce McArthur is alleged to have killed several men and hidden their dismembered bodies in garden planter boxes?" It was a hooky and typical of newspaper headlines, but I was rightly reminded that while articles may have content like this we shouldn't have gruesome facts jump out at people on the main page, particularly in concern for the bereaved. Meanwhile I'd submitted the page to a move discussion which stalled, restarted, failed for lack of consensus on a new name, then was summarily moved for overriding BLP concerns. Seeing that the hook couldn't go negative or sensationalistic, I was afraid that the rather dry alternatives wouldn't grab a lot of readers. In hopes of getting more pageviews, I quickly wrote the two related articles for a multi-article hook, and with help from reviewers and  got them into good shape.

It appeared on the main page on Tuesday 19 June 2018 with 15,610 (7,646 + 4,140 + 3,824) pageviews – more than half of the total coming from the two smaller articles. This was the sixth most-viewed hook for that month and just squeezed onto the leaderboard for hooks with 15,000+ views. So the strategy seemed to work, it added two other pretty-decent articles to the encyclopedia, and I learned quite a bit from the experience. Preparation is key to DYK, and it really pays to get all your ducks in a row.

ITN for 2010–2017 Toronto serial homicides
I'm mentioning this ITN promotion as it was an interesting experience and relates to the above. I'd nominated this for In the news three times. The first nomination was sub-par and declined as an ongoing criminal case. I periodically kept the article updated and a few months later the suspect pleaded guilty a year ahead of his scheduled trial. I updated the article and made a second nomination which was declined with advice to wait for sentencing. It was a bit of a struggle for me to keep the article updated as it became a big news story with easily 50 news items over a week. The article also attracted more editors, getting a fair amount of vandalism, point-of-view edits and arbitrary style edits; it also came under another move discussion. That tripled the work of updating the article, to deal with those issues, edit conflicts and discussions.

I was refreshing Google news the day of sentencing and, within minutes of the first news report, I updated the article and made a third nomination. Because of the earlier nom, the ITN volunteers were familiar with it and it was quickly promoted to the main page. (While an American serial killer might have been turned down, a Canadian serial killer was considered unusual enough to be promoted.) It was promoted so quickly that it it was reported at  for having insufficient discussion and support. Support did continue to come in, though, and it was decided that there was no sense in pulling it from the main page when it was certain to make its way back. So a little procedural hiccup.

The article was linked in the ITN section of the main page from 8 to 13 February 2019 (ITN items are removed on a FIFO basis as new items are promoted). On those 6 days it received a total of 0 views, peaking at 50,167 on 9 February (its first full day on ITN). In the 10 days before sentencing (between the second and third ITN nominations) it received an additional 0 views. It made the 5000 list of most-viewed articles for the weeks of (No. 1652 with 50,969 views),  (No. 322 with 120,118 views) and  (No. 414 with 108,296 views). Its best seven-day stretch was 7–13 Feb at 0 which might have ranked it around 140. This is the most views the article is likely to receive, its pre-sentencing background level being around 400 per day.

DYK for Young People Fucking & 29th Genie Awards & 10th Canadian Comedy Awards
&mdash; 00:02, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

After the articles above, I was eager to turn to lighter material and had been periodically working on a series for the Canadian Comedy Awards. I nominated this triple-hook on 28 December 2018. I was concerned whether the title of the primary article would be suitable for the main page and had included the overlong alt hook "... that the Canadian sex comedy distributed internationally as YPF was at the centre of a national political debate due to its controversial title, but went on to win a Genie and three Beavers?" I knew all the hooks could be improved but wanted some feedback on whether it was suitable for DYK at all before spending a lot of time on it. I also mentioned the possibility that it might be saved for 1 April, and was pleasantly surprised when reviewed, approved and moved it to April Fool's Main Page/Did You Know 73 minutes after I'd nominated it, as the second April Fool's hook for 2019. Another editor expressed concerns about it being "too vulgar" along the lines of WP:NOTCENSORED and the Main Page (an essay which deals mainly with pornography and images of violence), and the reviewer returned with the WP:NOTCENSORED policy and noted similar words which had previously appeared on the main page. It then basically waited for three months.

About two weeks before April Fool's, this quiet corner of Wikipedia gained increasing attention. proposed the hook "...that young people fucking scored three beavers?" as a double entendre with lower-case for ambiguity – which the April 1 rules permit to maintain a misleading hook. I initially felt this was pushing it a bit, but it seemed to be the acceptable standard after looking at the other nominations and the April Fool's page from previous years. (Also, there were by then more than a dozen approved nominees, and I was concerned that the less-funny ones might not be promoted.) I tried to work the Genie article back in by suggesting: "... that young people fucking bagged three beavers and got lucky with a genie?" I felt the alliteration was a little hookier. Some citation concerns were addressed with the help of on 31 March and it was added to the first prep area (there were two 1 April DYK sets run for 12 hours each).

Six hours before 1 April,, the admin on duty to – essentially the one ultimately responsible for what appears on the main page – stated concerns at  about the hook's suitability: that it was obscene, an abuse of NOTCENSORED, gratuitously offensive, and suggested that it be toned down or pulled. There were objections to these objections, cries of censorship, and comparison made to another hook "... that 1,900 people in Seattle rode the city's slut on a daily basis?" Another editor lamented an offensive word triggering profanity filters and making Wikipedia unusable in schools. Less than two hours before 1 April, it was decided to run with my original short hook. This raised a series of other objections about it being unfunny, ungrammatical, and ruining the April Fool's set – one editor stating that they thought the main page had been vandalized because it was so humourless. (The April Fool's DYK mandate is actually to confuse and mislead; any humour is a bonus and subjective in any case.)

I feel that Amakuru was probably right, and may have averted a lot of potential complaints from the community and readership. (Rules for Fools summarizes community consensus from a series of RfCs.) The film's title was the subject of a national censorship debate in 2007; it is provocative enough on its own, and pushing any further in a ribald direction may have seemed like a deliberate attempt to offend. I did find it upsetting that people would take such offence at "beaver" which is a national symbol, and feel it was somewhat unfair when the slut hook passed. Nonetheless, if it raised a stink that makes it more of an accomplishment. I imagine relatively few editors have gotten an admin to put the F-word on the main page in bold italics.

Pageviews appear modest at 8,246, but that's for 12 hours and there was a lot of competition. It placed 4th from its set of 9 hooks and 6th from the day's 19 total hooks. (The secondary hooked articles had enough views to raise it four places on the daily rank.) Pageviews for the day's hooks ranged from 1,123 to 12,687, with 13 of 19 hooks getting 5k+ views for the April 2019 statistics page. The second set received 50% more views than the first, perhaps because the first ran on Sunday evening in North America (comparison: |Eiseman-Reynard_and_others_v._the_United_Kingdom|Gennaro_Bizzarro|Young_People_Fucking|Crinkley_Bottom|Jesse_James_(treasurer)|Warren_G._Harding_(Texas_politician)|Army_Printing_and_Stationery_Service|Jaggln|United_States_v._422_Casks_of_Wine 1st set & |Ebbo_Bastard|Flag_of_Blackbeard|Chafin_v._Chafin|South_Lake_Union_Streetcar|Worthing_Tramocars|International_Banana_Museum|Stomp_the_Bus|Patsy_Dan_Rodgers|Mud_pie) 2nd set). For the month of April 2019, it was the 20th most-viewed hook and the 9th most-viewed non-lead hook (ie: without a picture). By hours on the main page, it was the 11th most-viewed or the 6th most-viewed non-lead hook. By the latter statistics, this was a tiny bit more successful than my previous best DYK, which was also a triple hook.

DYK for 1st Canadian Comedy Awards, Canadian Comedy Awards, Made in Canada, Peameal bacon and Poutine
Gatoclass (talk) 00:01, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

This was a continuation of work on the Canadian Comedy Awards articles, and an opportunity to try for a 5+ article hook to earn a spot on the Multiple Article Hook Hall of Fame. After the initial approval of my April Fool's hook, I was aiming for Canada Day, 1 July, so that they wouldn't run too close together. My initial idea was an eight-article hook with a fun Canadiana theme: "... that poutine and back bacon on a bun were served while Doug McKenzie gave The Beaver to Made in Canada, clowns and comedians at the inaugural Canadian Comedy Awards?" However, I couldn't find enough material to sufficiently expand or cover Mump and Smoot; and the McKenzie article was the main article for five others, so I found it difficult to expand it without updating the whole series. Poutine and Made in Canada were sent for copy edit on 24 April and 15 May, nominated for GA on 2 and 17 May, and passed on 7 and 16 June. I was quite dogged in begging for reviews and am thankful to for their wise and timely assistance throughout the process of developing and expanding the articles. With a five-article hook, there was five times as much that could go wrong.

The hook I'd applied with was a bit forced, so it was simplified to the five-article hook in the box above, List of Canadian comedians spun out into a separate hook, and a picture added – making this my first lead hook! Given how long the hook was, I thought the picture balanced it pretty well. It was promoted to the special occasions area for 1 July.

When the special occasions hooks were, another hook, Frank Borman, was given the lead/picture slot. I knew that was a possibility but when I actually saw it, with an American national image chosen over a Canadian national image for Canada Day, it didn't sit right with me. A followed.

The Borman hook had been chosen to lead: (1) for variety as the previous day's prep area had a food image, (2) because it was believed that Borman had more worldwide interest, and (3) the volunteer could not identify the ingredients in the poutine picture and didn't like its presentation on a fast food tray. Pageviews and other evidence was used to suggest that poutine was of worldwide interest, perhaps moreso on that day. The first two points were quickly settled as nominators volunteered to move their hooks. The other food image was moved back to a non-consecutive day and the Borman hook was moved up (its connection to the day [the anniversary of his entering West Point and retiring from NASA] wasn't as strong and the hook fact was that he hadn't died yet, so there was some urgency in running it before that changed). The issues with the poutine image required more discussion.

This is something I should have checked before the GA review of poutine. I just don't deal a lot with images. I didn't find any fault with the images which were in the article, I felt they gave adequate coverage and encyclopedic value, and didn't bother to search Commons for better images (I was a dial-up user at the time). Also, I was under the impression (per ) that pictures had to be 100px wide, which seemed to necessitate a close-up picture. However, that rule has apparently been significantly relaxed in practice, and landscape-oriented pictures were being allowed at 160px.

A series of other images were suggested (right). The top one was suggested as having been selected for a list on Wikimedia Commons to represent poutine. It is a high-quality image, but Commons is not an encyclopedia and has other considerations in its selection. I didn't feel high-resolution quality mattered at 160px and felt that the image was elitist food porn, that it was an elaborated recipe non-representative of the subject as a whole, and had too many external factors distracting from the food itself – that the picture did not provide an accurate and identifiable illustration of the subject and was not the ideal encyclopedic image. The next image down was a long-standing image from the article's infobox (and from the same restaurant as the top image) and showed the three basic ingredients, but there were objections to it looking like "a plate of indiscriminate slop". I countered that "poutine" is often linked to the Quebecois word for "mess" and has been described as such, so that was encyclopedically accurate. In hopes of finding some consensus, I searched Commons and proposed the lower three pictures, which show the essential three-ingredient dish on a plate. The bottom one, which happened to have been taken at Wikimania 2017 in Montreal, was selected for the main page appearance and added to the article.

I'd been reasonably sure that this hook would achieve 15k views but I wasn't sure it would get the 25k for the picture hook leaderboard. Pageviews far exceeded my expectations. I'd mentioned in discussion that this was "the one day Canadians can shrug off their modesty and call attention to themselves" and that may have had something to do with it. Another factor might be the popularity of poutine, which had the picture slot (pictures tend to get more views). It may have been the "perfect storm" of factors: the right day, the right picture hook, and the broadness of subjects including food, nostalgia, culture, national identity, and humour. The five hooks received a total of [//tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2019-07-01&end=2019-07-01&pages=Canadian_Comedy_Awards|1st_Canadian_Comedy_Awards|Made_in_Canada|Peameal_bacon|Poutine 67,475 views], each going up proportionally from their baseline views. Three of the five, including the GAs and food articles, had more than 10k views. At the time, the total views put it at 14th place on the lead hook leaderboard and 24th amongst all hooks. It also had the distinction of being the most-viewed hook with three or more articles, and the most-viewed Canada-related hook. With additional views for the week, Poutine reached No. 2098 on the WP:5000 for with 41,499 page views (Canada Day was No. 79 with a quarter-million views!). It was the most-viewed hook for that month, and the second-most-viewed hook for 2019 (dwarfed by the thirtieth-anniversary DYK for Fall of the Berlin Wall in November). So all around, pretty amazing!

Almost four years later, the poutine article got an even bigger spike of nearly 50k pageviews when an animated Google doodle of poutine was run on 19 May 2023 (in Canada only). Poutine became the biggest search term in Canada, which was covered in the media (Global news). The Google doodle can be seen here with some background information and preliminary workups; note the animation at the bottom where a friendly beaver demonstrates how to construct a poutine!

DYK for List of Canadian comedians
This was split off from a six-article hook proposal, above, and while it qualified it was in the worst shape of the group of submissions. I did a little more expansion to get a stand-alone hook for it, a bit of layout work, and then scoured Commons for pictures of performing comedians. All in all, was pretty pleased with it, and glad that prodded me to do the extra work. We decided on the hook "... that Canadians consider their comedians (Wayne and Shuster pictured), along with their singers and musicians, to be the country's cultural representatives?" However, it was pulled from promotion with disagreement over what "cultural representatives" meant. I still felt that it worked, but it stalled and we ended up going in another direction when it finally ran two months later. It could have been better, but I wasn't going to make a GA out of it.

DYK for La Poutine Week
After working on the poutine article, I had it in mind to write this article with a DYK to run on 1 Feb, coinciding with the food festival. However, sources were a bit spare and the New Year period a bit busy. I got back to this in winter 2021–22, by which point there were some Covid-19 related developments that I felt made for a really interesting article.

DYK for Hey Lady!
&mdash; 00:01, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd written a draft on this nice little webseries, which I used to expand the placeholder stub created when it was nominated for national awards. With a bit more expansion I was happy enough to put it up for DYK. This might be a case of procrastinating on publishing an article, waiting on sources which might not be forthcoming. So long as notability isn't a concern, it's probably better to get the information out there.

DYKs for Canadian Idiot and Parliament Hill
00:03, 1 July 2021 (UTC) 00:02, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

I started with an expansion of "Canadian Idiot" as a fun DYK for Canada Day 2021. There were other DYKs in the works with interest in running multiple hooks (discussions here and here), and I co-nominated Parliament Hill after completing its GA review (it was 's first GAN/DYK). We ultimately ended up running with four hooks (half of each set) on 1 and 2 July (UTC), which covered the duration of the holiday in Canada's time zones. They don't usually like one subject dominating a set, but there was enough variety among the hooks that it passed scrutiny. The article subjects were: flag of Nova Scotia; John Mercer Johnson, a father of Confederation; Parliament Building (Quebec); "Canadian Idiot", an American song; Parliament Hill; Laura McKinlay Robinson, an actress and entrepreneur; Murray Dowey, an Olympic athlete; and Walter Bean Grand River Trail, part of the Trans-Canada Trail.

The |John_Mercer_Johnson|Parliament_Building_(Quebec)|Canadian_Idiot|Parliament_Hill|Laura_McKinlay_Robinson|Murray_Dowey|Walter_Bean_Grand_River_Trail combined readership for the eight articles totalled 0 pageviews. "Canadian Idiot" and Parliament Hill were my personal best for single-article no-picture/picture hooks. These and Flag of Nova Scotia (the other picture hook) exceeded 10,000 pageviews and placed on the monthly leaderboard at DYKSTATS. (Canadian Idiot placed on the permanent leaderboard.) This was clearly a team effort, with much thanks to, , and all the other DYK authors and volunteers.

DYK for Canadian Police and Peace Officers' Memorial
I came across material for this while doing the GA review for Parliament Hill. Since the Canada Day sets were full, I decided to delay expansion of the article to run it on the memorial day (the last Sunday in September). Things being what they are, I forgot about it until September rolled around, then hurriedly did the expansion and DYK nom, finding a nice picture on Commons (the picture had been mislabelled, perhaps the uploader didn't know what it was?).

The hook had just made it onto the queue when DYK sets were changed from a 24-hour rotation to a 12-hour rotation; this placed it on the wrong day so it was pulled and returned to the special occasions holding area. This was a good thing as I'd actually requested the wrong day (while checking sources I must have turned my computer calendar to a different year). So it was moved to the proper slot for the day and time that the ceremony was held, and all went splendidly. A nice little article, probably GA worthy with a little cleanup.

DYK for Candidate for a Pullet Surprise and A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer
—valereee (talk) 12:02, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

I have fond memories of the former poem (both of them were viral emails in the mid-1990s) and was convinced at the time that it was a multi-author work that grew as the email circulated. I wish I could have researched it a bit better and found more of the books which referenced it. I knew I was going on a wikibreak, though, and decided to publish and promote them. I was pleasantly surprised when it received a combined 11,000 pageviews in my absence – making it my third consecutive DYK to rank in the monthly top-ten and appear on the stats page. I hope that it spread a few smiles around.

DYKs for Timewasters, Demon (comics) and Chicks with Sticks
Often I'll add or rewrite plot summaries for media I consume. With this television programme and graphic novel, I decided to expand their fairly sparse articles for better representation of the subjects and to make their notability more apparent. Additionally, as a US-version of the TV programme was in development, I thought it a good idea to get the article for the original programme sorted. Fun little articles to work on.

I wrote a draft for Chicks with Sticks in response to an article request at Canadian Wikipedians' notice board/Requests. It was some time, however, before I was able to view a copy of this television movie and write a proper plot summary for it. I'm sure someone more clever than myself could have come up with an April Fools' hook, but I didn't want to tarnish something as sacrosanct as a Canadian hockey movie. I also wasn't confident about the extra scrutiny that might draw, though I'm pretty sure the subject meets notability guidelines (won minor awards, was included in a top-ten list five years after release, screened at a film festival, etc.).

DYK for Free Comic Book Day
I reviewed this article as part of a GAN backlog drive, made a lot of suggestions and found a bunch of sources to improve it. Unfortunately, the nominator was on a wikivacation and nobody from WikiProject Comics was able to take that editor's place, so I had to fail the review. Afterwards, I made the changes myself and was confident that it would pass GAN, and decided that I would try to time a GAN and DYK for the day of the event. Then the event took a hiatus due to Covid-19, When I realized that it was back on schedule for 7 May 2022, I updated the article and nominated it at GAN at the end of March, which was cutting it a bit close. The GA review was taken up on 21 April and passed on 1 May. I made the DYK nomination the same day and posted at WT:DYK. They like to have a full week for due diligence but discussion made an allowance for it; thankfully enough editors wanted to see it run for the 20th anniversary.

DYK for When Jews Were Funny and Being Canadian
It took me a while to finish creation/expansion on these two very similar documentary films, and come up with a DYK. I tried to have it run for May 2022 (Canadian Jewish Heritage Month). However the review stalled and the month ran out. I then requested 1 July (Canada Day) for the second reviewer, but got busy and didn't check that it was moved to the special requests holding area. It instead ran on 8 June.

DYK for The Canadian Conspiracy
This is another one I'd been wanting to do for a while and got it ready for Canada Day 2023. The 38-year-old made-for-TV mockumentary movie still feels relevant, and almost prophetic of the culture of fear in the disinformation age. Just a great satire that cuts deep on several levels. With the nomination some of my hooks were disqualified as in-universe – another case where they might have run for April Fools' but I'm still happier to have it run on Canada's birthday. It got a very decent 11,669 pageviews, running the full day.

DYKs for Let's All Go to the Lobby, Johnny & Clyde, Canada Centre Building, Singh v Canada, Ukrainian Sheriffs
These were all articles I came across during editing drives for various WikiProjects and decided to take them to DYK. Let's All Go to the Lobby was from a GAN backlog drive in 2020 (the same as for FCBD) where I did a very thorough review but the nominator wasn't able to make the changes. I had it in mind to take this to GA myself since I'd put in the work, and finally got around to it to start my 2024 WikiCup entries. Johnny & Clyde came to my attention during a GOCE copyediting drive and I was interested enough to watch this notoriously bad movie and expand the article for DYK. I was surprised when it received 13k pageviews in 12 hours, among my highest and just shy of the all-time leaderboard. Canada Centre Building and Singh v Canada were articles I sourced for an Unreferenced articles drive; they interested me and I was just able to make a 5&times; expansion for DYK, running the latter as a special occasion. Ukrainian Sheriffs was an expansion I made for the fourth edition of Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month and Vami IV's in memorium. I didn't finish it until the end of March which was too bad as it might have made a good addition for April Fools'. The hook attracted a respectable 10k pageviews over 24 hours.

DYK for Score: A Hockey Musical
This is a movie I'd been wanting to see and I was able to find sources for a decent expansion; the subject was also interesting enough for a number of hook options. I nominated this for another Canada Day hook.

DYK assists
I have assisted with a few articles that were up for DYK. The first was Template:Did you know nominations/TAI Aksungur which I happened upon at DYK noms, for an article about a military drone. I gave the article a copy edit for some tone issues and close paraphrasing, then I ended up expanding it and proposing some new hooks. One was the misleading "... that an Aksungur (English: gyrfalcon) male can carry aloft 750 kilograms?" which might have passed for April Fools' but we went with another one to run it sooner. It wasn't my usual, but was fun to work on while I had a break between other things.

Then there were three articles that invited me to expand. Two were Wayne and Shuster skits and a third was about a travelling museum exhibition. They were good subjects to work on and Yoninah did all the heavy lifting to get them organized and see the DYK noms through, so I was happy to lend a hand with them. The Precious Legacy received 5.665 views and made it onto the stats page (at the time, my fourth-highest DYK in views per hour).

I believe that the Ivan Golunov nomination was abandoned by its original editor. Those who continued with it didn't have a huge amount of time, so I did some citation cleanup, copy edit, and other gnomish work to help move it along, for which I was credited with an assist.

I was alerted to Made in Canada due to the article name, and started reading about certification marks to see if there might be an alternative title. It was interesting enough that I expanded the article and responded to the DYK reviewer's concerns.

I was only the reviewer for the USA Field Hockey Hall of Fame DYK, but I really liked this ten-article hook and suggested a change which helped it get onto the all-time leaderboards, so I decided to include it on my list for my small efforts (I'm just that pleased with it). It ranked as the 5th most-viewed hook in February 2021 or 2nd by views per hour.

McNally v R was something I happened across at the Teahouse. A newish editor was asking if it was an article-worthy topic. I checked for sources, agreed that it was, and then continued giving advice through the article's creation, taking care of tone and neutrality, copy editing, performing reference cleanup, suggesting the DYK and proposing hooks, and helping the nomination through. I guess others agreed that it was interesting, as it just squeezed onto the April leaderboard with the highest views-per-hour of my previous half-dozen DYKs.

Holy door–Feast of Saint James–Jacobean Holy Year is a triple-hook picture DYK that I helped prepare. It came to my attention at the end of April 2023 when all three articles were submitted at WP:GOCER. I accepted the requests before they caused a kerfuffle (only two submissions are normally allowed per editor), did copyedit and cleanup, and collaborated to get them in shape for special-occasion DYK on 25 July. The hook had 21k views and ranked 15th for views-per-hour that month. I didn't realize until after it had run that it was part of a theme set for Saint James Day.