User:Valereee/Instructor Best Practices for Did You Know

Course instructors often use Wikipedia as a part of a syllabus, and often instructors ask students to submit their creations/expansions to the Did You Know project. This is a great idea! It represents a peer review process, and it can be very exciting for students to see their work appear on Wikipedia's Main Page, possibly attracting thousands of views of the article.

These are the best practices for using DYK in an educational course.

1. Encourage students to nominate articles as early as possible.

Articles do not need to be "finished" before they can be nominated. They need to meet the basic DYK requirements: No more than 7 days after being moved to article space, long enough (1500 characters), no policy violations, and including at least one inline source per paragraph. As soon as they meet that standard, they can be nominated. The DYK process can take a month or more. Students can keep working on their articles while the nomination goes through review and scheduling. Submitting early means a much greater likelihood the article will appear on the Main Page before the end of term and that students will see their current classmates' work while it's appearing on the Main Page, and then the next day, how many hits it got!

2. Require students to name you as their co-nominator and to respond to any pings.

Because reviewing articles by new editors can be a lengthy process, we need someone to guarantee the nomination won't be abandoned. When students are able to simply submit an article as fulfillment of a course requirement and aren't required to do further followup, we often spend valuable volunteer time fixing whatever is wrong with the nomination, hook, or article. Knowing their instructor is being pinged at the same time they are will encourage them to respond. Working through the review process makes fulfilling this course requirement more meaningful for the student and less burdensome for volunteers.

3. Require DYK nominations be made at least three weeks before end of term.

This will help you avoid ending up being the only one left to respond to nominators' questions.