Expand an article to five times its previous length, or write one from nothing, and a seven-day window opens onto a corner of Wikipedia most new editors never find: a nomination for Did You Know, the rotating feature that puts one sentence from a recent article on the Main Page for several hours at a stretch.
That sentence is called a hook, and it answers to its own rules before anyone argues about notability or anything else. Convention keeps it short enough to read in a glance, under roughly two hundred characters, and genuinely interesting to a reader with no stake in the subject. It also has to be sourced at the clause, not the paragraph — a footnote sitting directly after the claim it supports, not one parked at the end of three sentences and expected to cover all of them.
A nomination does not place itself. Another editor has to review it: checking the hook’s wording against the exact source cited, running the prose through a tool built to catch close paraphrasing, confirming the article is new or expanded enough, and young enough, to qualify at all. Anyone who has had five hooks approved already owes the queue a review of someone else’s nomination in return — an unpaid quid pro quo that keeps hundreds of volunteers checking each other’s work, with no single editor in charge of the whole line.
Neutrality is the step that catches agencies off guard. A hook drafted for a founder’s biography — “is a visionary entrepreneur who revolutionized the payments industry” — comes back before a reviewer even opens the source, not because the claim is false but because that register has no place on the Main Page regardless of what the footnote says. The version that clears review usually keeps the fact and drops the adjective: “processed its first transaction from a dorm room before the company had a business bank account.”
A hook should be concise, accurate, and interesting — written in a neutral tone rather than one that reads as an advertisement.
Articles for Deletion asks whether a subject belongs in the encyclopedia at all. Did You Know asks something narrower, and in its own way just as telling: can one sentence about this subject stand in front of a few hundred thousand readers without reading like a pitch? An article can clear the first test easily and fail the second on its opening attempt, and the fix almost never touches the sourcing. It touches the adjectives.
None of it buys more than a few hours on a page that refreshes itself all day, and a rejected hook doesn’t reopen the question of notability — the article simply stays where it was, Main Page or not. What a hook that survives review does confirm, in a small and specific way, is that a volunteer with no interest in the outcome read the sentence and found nothing in it worth sending back. For a biography built by someone paid to make the case look as strong as possible, that is a narrower door than it sounds.
