Wikipedia talk:Did you know/Archive 1

message: There is no clear information on this 'substance'. This topic is too wooly to go on the front page without some kind of context. It certainly doesn't belong in Did You Know... -- surely a place for definite facts. Mr. Jones 11:19, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Red Mercury 

message: Are stubs appropriate on Dyk?  I notice that Jimmy Piersall is a stub.  --Spikey 17:37, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stubs appropriate? 

message: How long should a Dyk item remain on the Main Page?  Minimum and maximum.  Are all the items replaced at the same time? - Bevo 19:16, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Frequency of  Dyk updates

message: This has never been codified, but I do it I make an effort not to be too country-centric or subject-centric. I think it's good if there's a mix of biology and pop culture and historical biography and so on, and, as with everything, it's better to not be Anglo-Amero-Auscentric, so I try to avoid provincial U.S. stuff (my POV) when possible, although sometimes articles are just solid enough (c.f. Naval War College) to warrant it. jengod 19:34, Mar 19, 2004 (UTC)
:2004 FH could have inspired a good Dyk item yesterday.  Apparently the whole planet would have noticed had it come much closer! - Bevo 19:41, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: One other rule of thumb

message: Isn't it supposed to be "octopi"? – Minh Nguyễn 16:03, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The word is derived from Greek, not Latin, so it isn't standard practice to use "octopi", which is a Latin plural. The proper way of doing it is to use the English plural, "octopuses", or the Greek plural, "octopodes", pronounced "awk-TAHP-uh-deez". The Greek plural, which I prefer because of its sheer coolness, is considered pedantic and is rarely used. Oh, well. Chris Roy 20:54, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  April 10: Octopuses 

message: Yesterday I tried to add the message not to use the "|right" markup on the In The News and Did You Know templates to as many pages as I could find that were relevant. I know it seems rather unilateral of me, but for several weeks now I have found myself manually changing each image to the  system anyway. When you use the extended image markup "|right", an error in the software causes an unsymmetrical white border to be placed behind the image (in all browsers), as demonstrated by this link. Normally in articles this is not a problem, because the articles have white backgrounds anyway. However on the Main Page, the sections with these templates have coloured backgrounds, which results these images with their borders appearing very ugly to the end user. The use of the div system fixes this problem, without changing the positioning of the image itself (with the slight exception that the text padding around the image might be smaller). I placed these messages on these pages in the hope that the remainder of people who still use the "|right" markup will change back to the old system, and thus save me the effort of having to change it every couple of days. - Mark 04:06, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using div style... instead of |right 

message: Recently on Talk:Main Page, there has been complaint that this section of the main page doesn't explain that these articles are new and therefore may contain inaccurate information. What ought to be done about this to avoid embarassment? Johnleemk | Talk 10:48, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought Jengod's solution of actually letting people know that the did you know facts were from new articles (it wasn't obvious before as Talk:Main Page proves) was a good one. I propose to revert Eloquence's revert unless he lets us know why it is problematic. Pcb21| Pete 09:45, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Following at least two more separate incidents of confusion about what the purpose of dyk is, I put back a "newest articles" notice. Pcb21| Pete 11:14, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The double ellipsis in "Did you know... From Wikipedia's newest articles..." looked a bit clumsy to me, so I tweaked the punctuation. Comments? Harry R 09:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually think a better solution would be to have this template called "From Wikipedia's newest articles" and have the italic subheader saying "Did you know...". That would make it even clearer what the point of the section was, and (more importantly perhaps) would make it read more attractively. Harry R 10:22, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I STRONGLY second Harry's suggestion to rename this template to "From Wikipedia's newest articles", with a secondary title of "Did you know...". The current name just SCREAMS that it IS IS IS a general trivia section, totally contrary to what the rules (above) say. As this intended NOT to be and not to become a general trivia section, it urgently needs to be renamed to reflect that. Ropers 12:35, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I sense no urgency here. "Did you know" is already a trivia section. That rule up the top is to stop people trawling through random existing articles to find quirky facts to put on the Main Page. That would degenerate the section into a POV war space. - Mark 14:43, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Mark. In all the time we've had DYK we've only had one or two articles that were old-school and they were identified quite quickly. I think the currently "From wikipedia's newest articles blah blah" thingy is attractive and works well. I kind of would rather have the "All new articles" link back the bottom of the section as well, but I'm not very hung up about it. jengod 19:05, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
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T-Mobile team looked too much like an ad. Two days on the front page was JTDM. Stevertigo 16:40, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: A change in formatting?

message: Seems to be only an hour or so for most DYK's.  The rules seem to hint at 6 hrs or so.  Is that something we want to stick closer to?  Personally I'd rather not have lots of people refrech the main page every hour for the extra strain on the servers. - Taxman 22:58, Jul 22, 2004 (UTC)
* I think they're moving too fast.  I'd prefer DYKs stayed for a day or so, much like the feature.  blankfaze | (беседа!) 23:21, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Updating too fast?

message: Perhaps "essay" in the title more refers to it being an "attempt"? By that definition, it sounds as if it is an essay (an attempt). I fear the caption on the main page appears to ignore the older definition of essay. <B>zoney</B> ███ <B>talk</B> 22:58, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Essay on criticism 

message: Would it be possible to have a feature similar to Special:randompage that provides random DYK? SimonMayer 08:54, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Random DYK 

message: I've just wrote an (IMHO) nice article about communications with submarines, and now had for the first time a look at how the DYK section is organized. I hesistate to put to be so bold as to put my article right into the the DYK section appearing on the talk page, but I would like to notify those persons who usually maintains DYK of my new article. Maybe I'm not the only one thinking like that. So, why not put up section here on the Talk page for suggestions. I make a start by setting up such a list. Keep it or delete it: ;-) Simon A. 10:25, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Be bold! I wrote a nice new article on Leyton F.C., it had an interesting fact in it, I added it to DYK. And I'm not even a logged-in user - hopefully, no-one will judge it any the worse for that. Why not just do the same? --195.11.216.59 16:41, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  DYK suggestions 

message: No, I'm not too skeered to add items myself, I'm just too bemused by the whole "template" thing. More after reading the Rules than before. Could the "Rules" please be complemented by a step-by-step "Instruction" on what actually to do? Aimed at the beginner? Not so much focused on what not to do?--Bishonen (talk) 15:20, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: From rules to instructions

message: The DYK notification template links to the DYK template itself... should it link here instead? 68.81.231.127 10:14, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  DYK notification template 

message: Hi! Tom, the new indenting looks funny on Firefox. See: :Image:Indent-sample-dyk-firefox.jpg. Would you mind reverting or recoding? jengod 21:32, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)
:Hmm, I haven't seen anything funny on my Firefox 1.0. See :Image:Did you know Firefox 1.0 screenshot.png. ωhkoh [Т] 11:41, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)
:Sadness...it was fixed and great for a while, and now it's back to being strange. See :Image:Firefox-indent-screenshot-2.jpg. This revision had it fixed (at least in my browser), with the neat indenting, and then it got wonky again... jengod 22:12, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)
:: Should be fixed again. Although I still can't replicate that problem at all in any version of Firefox. Tom- 22:33, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm having similar indenting problems on Mozilla 1.7 right now (took me a while to figure out it was browser-specific). - Nat Krause 09:29, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Indent

message: "... that in 1944 Gwethalyn Graham was the first Canadian writer to reach number one on The New York Times bestseller list with a novel depicting an interfaith romance between a Protestant woman and a Jewish man? (User:Bearcat) 68.81.231.127 13:18, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Gwethalyn Graham

message: shouldn't that be "the first person KNOWN to have converted to Buddhism in America" ? You can't really prove a negative. Doops 15:24, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  First buddhist convert?