User talk:Theleekycauldron/Archives/2023/February

February songs
yesterday's cantata, 300 years later --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:31, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

today a book, Alte Liebe, for Valentine --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:54, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

... and today the regional festival - DYK of 13 years ago ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:42, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

My story on 24 February is about Artemy Vedel (TFA by Amitchell235), and I made a suggestion for more peace, - what do you think? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:07, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Levi Canning
Hi. Could you respond to my comments on the GA page, just so I am able to hopefully finish everything before the 7 days is up. Thanks. - Therealscorp1an (talk) 21:36, 15 February 2023 (UTC)


 * @Therealscorp1an: I'll try to get back to you soon, but know that the 7 days isn't a hard limit – an inactivity fail happens well after seven days of no nominator involvement, despite multiple pings. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 21:38, 15 February 2023 (UTC)


 * What happens in the event of an inactivity fail by a nominator? - Therealscorp1an (talk) 03:53, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
 * @Therealscorp1an: The article doesn't become a GA, but it can be resubmitted whenever they return to activity :) theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 03:57, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh, alright. Well, I have pretty much completed everything I can (I've explained the rest on the talk page), so when you can, please reply to it. Thanks. - Therealscorp1an (talk) 05:53, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for reviewing the article, even if it failed, but I now understand why it needed to. I have two questions, however. I was thinking of nominating this article for GA status, but I am unsure because I know that a lot of the page is listed, so what would you say? Secondly, this may be a bit out of the blue, but how do you archive sections of your own talk page? Mine is getting a little bit out of hand. Thanks. - Therealscorp1an (talk) 23:10, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry for thedelay, @Therealscorp1an! Man, it's been over a year since I had to think about that – here's the markup I used:


 * I think I had to do some manual archiving to get the jig going, as well. cheers! theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 09:20, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

GalliumBot query
If I understand task 1 correctly, any DYK hook modifications post-promotion should be logged by the bot. Hence I checked whether would show up on the relevant talk page, but it didn't. Do I have the wrong understanding or is something amiss?  Schwede 66  22:54, 17 February 2023 (UTC)


 * @Schwede66: Hey there! I didn't originally have GalliumBot watching the Main Page – ERRORS is kind of its own beast – but I've flipped that on now. No reason not to. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 08:49, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Good move! Thanks.  Schwede 66  09:13, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

I think I've triggered a bug. I've and the bot picked up just one of the hook changes but not the other one. Not sure how often it happens that somebody edits more than one hook in a set but either way, I thought I'd let you know about it.  Schwede 66  06:59, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Assessing hooks
Thanks for writing your thoughts up and pitching a draft. There has been something going over in my mind for a while, and I thought I'd share. Essentially I wonder if we have easily-accessible data about racial bias in DYK performance, and how we might work against it in practice.


 * As I've discussed elsewhere, my hunch is that black American history performs relatively well when we discuss the grotesque and violent (stories of slavery, lynching, pain, racial discrimination), but not the positive or culturally distinctive. The poor performance of the Enterprise, a black Omaha newspaper, may because of a poor-quality hook in terms of writing; but I wonder if it's part of a larger trend.


 * My hunch is not just for black American history. Looking at the history of article alerts for WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America, the hook ("mine") on Seminole burning, about a depraved lynching, did quite well (16k views); the previous DYK nomination, for Acoutsina, which featured a hook about history and relationships, did not fare so well (3k). The disparity can't be accounted for, I don't think, by lasting interest; in the last month, Acoutsina and the lynching have had comparable page views. The only thing I can think of is depravity, violence, and maybe a bit of wordsmithing...

The reason I bring this up is this: While I understand that your position of page views is that they are not the end-all-be-all, especially for underrepresented histories and stories (which these two subjects are), I wonder if the push for writing in conformity to established best practices -- specifically best practices for page views -- might end up reinforcing a (perceived, since I don't know if it exists) trend toward "turn[ing] Black pain and suffering into a spectacle for white/Western audiences" (quoted above). Even if we don't have this data to confirm or disprove my hunch, I wonder what your thoughts are in analysing page views and establishing best practices for hooks that don't appeal to our audiences because it highlights experiences and histories they don't relate to. I know you see DYK as a curation service, but even curators may end up reinforcing troubling practices, without them knowing it; how can we not feed into that? And how can we not feed into that, especially when we highlight page views, an indication for what resonates with our audience (for good reasons or not), so prominently in our discussions at DYK?

No easy answers here, I don't think. The solution to this problem, if there is one, might be a series of subjective calls on individual hooks -- that's ultimately fine, though inconsistent over time. (And it sort of sets apart minoritized history in a way I'm somewhat uncomfortable with; why go with page views for crafting hooks on bands, but not black newspapers?) Maybe there's something else you've been thinking of? I don't know. This is one of the things that troubles me. Urve (talk) 06:39, 19 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Hey there,, thanks for dropping by. That's a tough question, and I definitely understand where you're coming from. As far as a request for statistics goes... yeah, it's really not even that necessary. Our readers are always interested in hooks about genocide, oppression, and pain – it's hard for most other topics to stack up to that. If you want to do your own digging, Did you know/Statistics/Monthly DYK pageview leaders is a good repository.
 * As for how we deal with it, you're right: there's no easy answer. There's a really small, almost edge-case subset of DYK hooks defined by being both lurid and extremely encyclopedic, and oppression tends to fall into that category. I suspect that most DYK regulars would challenge the premise that emphasizing black pain is something to even be avoided or cautioned against.
 * I think the best advice I have for you is written down in the section on topic bias: sexier hooks sell, sometimes without great hooks, and non-lurid topics can be worth the drop in pageviews. Pageviews are really only helpful if the topic as a whole isn't so lurid as to significantly boost pageviews, or so boring as to significantly hurt them. If the pageviews are skewed, you have to consider how much of that is down to readers prioritizing the sexiness/notoriety of the topic over whether the hook has a good, encyclopedic story. I mean, I think the point I always try to get across is that pageviews are about what our readers want; we should care about that, but we should care about lots of other things too. Sometimes the things our readers want are just things we're not going to give them, and that's okay.
 * The challenge you're up against, though, isn't pageviews – I don't think some obsession with interestingness has arms-raced hooks about minorities towards being about suffering (at least, not recently). I think it's just kind of always been that way. What you're looking for, if you care about changing DYK's modus operandi, is gonna be convincing the community that the Main Page should, in effect, be censored with respect to these kinds of hooks. If the community agrees that some content isn't worth running, no one's gonna care about writing quality or pageviews, but they have to agree first. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 07:27, 19 February 2023 (UTC)