Template talk:Did you know nominations/Alfred Cowles

Hook modifications

• ... that Alfred Cowles stopped publishing his newsletter as he could not predict the stock market? [2024-04-04 at 14:02:20, by Ganesha811]
• ... that Alfred Cowles stopped publishing his stock market newsletter as he could not predict the stock market? [2024-04-04 at 14:08:52, by Ganesha811]

GalliumBot (talk • contribs) (he/it) 14:25, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@Ganesha811 I really dislike both these hook modifications. My fault for not monitoring your changes more closely but FYI – it seems way too wordy and preachy and "tells" too much as a hook. The most compelling hooks always withhold a bit of information so the reader wants to find out more. You have to preserve a bit of "mystery". (I only just checked because I was wondering why the performance of this hook was so poor!) You can see for yourself which hooks perform the bet on the statistics page for DYK. In this case, the reviewer said the hook was good and interesting, so I'm not sure why you changed it so drastically. Cielquiparle (talk) 17:32, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Noted - I felt the change was an improvement, and though I agree we want to "hook" the reader, we don't want to confuse them, and I thought the sentence as written was somewhat unclear. I'll be more cautious with modifications moving forward, though. —Ganesha811 (talk) 17:53, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

@Ganesha811 Sure, in future if you think a big change is necessary, feel free to flag it at DYK Talk where the "problem" hooks are discussed... Often it's better just to discuss, ping the nominator, demote the hook if necessary, and send it back to the drawing board for more workshopping – much better than making big changes unilaterally with no discussion. Cielquiparle (talk) 18:01, 14 April 2024 (UTC)