santhosh/wiki-dyk

Wikipedia "Did You Know" Archive

Structured data curated from the "Did you know" (DYK) snippets Wikipedia communities feature on the Main Page — the short, sourced "... that X?" facts. In DYK parlance each such fact is a hook; this dataset holds one record per hook occurrence, enriched with the articles the hook links to.

Config	Language	Rows	DYK section
en	English	117,342	Did you know ...
fr	French	12,011	Le saviez-vous ?
de	German	14,354	Schon gewusst?

The schema is identical across languages (language-specific absences are null), so the configs can be mixed or compared directly.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

en = load_dataset("santhosh/wiki-dyk", "en", split="train")
print(en[0]["content_body"])

Data fields

One record per hook occurrence:

Field	Type	Description
language	string	Wiki language code (en, fr, de).
archive_page	string	Source archive page the hook was read from.
day	date	Date the hook appeared on the Main Page. null where the archive does not record it (French before 2017).
set_time	timestamp (UTC)	Set-removal timestamp where the archive records one (English from 2008); null elsewhere.
hook_wikitext	string	Raw wikitext of the hook, for re-rendering or re-analysis.
content_body	string	Reader HTML rendered locally from the wikitext (bold, italic, links).
linked_pages	list	Articles the hook links to, enriched (see below).

Each entry in linked_pages:

Field	Type	Description
page_id	int64	Page id of the canonical (redirect-resolved) target; null if the article was later deleted.
rev_id	int64	Revision current on the DYK date — historically accurate and reproducible.
page_title	string	Canonical target title (redirects resolved), not the link text.
short_description	string	Short description (local on enwiki, Wikidata-backed elsewhere); null if none.
page_image	string	The article's free page image filename; null if none.
wikidata_qid	string	The article's Wikidata item (e.g. Q42).
article_topics	list<struct{qid:int64, title:string}>	Topic categories from the topictrends service; qid is the topic's Wikidata item (stable cross-language key), title its localized name. null when unavailable.
prominent	bool	The featured article(s) of the hook — the bold link(s) on wikis with a bolding convention.

Example record

{
  "language": "en",
  "archive_page": "Wikipedia:Did you know archive/2026/July",
  "day": "2026-07-08",
  "set_time": "2026-07-08T00:00:00Z",
  "hook_wikitext": "* ... that '''[[Iron Bridge, Lucknow|one of the earliest iron bridges in India]]''' ''(pictured)'' was ...?",
  "content_body": "... that <b><a href=\"./Iron_Bridge,_Lucknow\">one of the earliest iron bridges in India</a></b> <i>(pictured)</i> was ...?",
  "linked_pages": [
    {
      "page_id": 12345,
      "rev_id": 67890,
      "page_title": "Iron Bridge, Lucknow",
      "short_description": "Bridge in Uttar Pradesh, India",
      "page_image": "Iron_bridge_Lucknow.jpg",
      "wikidata_qid": "Q130206787",
      "article_topics": [{ "qid": 9079095, "title": "Bridges_in_India" }],
      "prominent": true
    }
  ]
}

How it was built

DYK archive pages are fetched as raw wikitext and parsed per-language; content_body is rendered locally from the parse tree (no HTML API). Linked pages are enriched via each wiki's action API: canonical title and page id (redirects resolved), the revision current on the DYK date, short description, free page image, Wikidata item, plus topic categories from the topictrends service. A hook appearing across multiple days or sets yields one record per occurrence.

Source code: https://github.com/santhoshtr/dyk-archive/

License and attribution

This dataset is derived from Wikipedia article and archive text, which is released under CC BY-SA 4.0 (also available under the GFDL). The dataset is distributed under the same terms.

Attribution is to the Wikipedia contributors of each source wiki (en, fr, de). Per CC BY-SA, reuse must credit Wikipedia and share adaptations under a compatible license. page_title, rev_id, and archive_page let any fact be traced back to its exact source revision.

Limitations

• Coverage follows each wiki's archive completeness; months with no archive page are simply absent (normal gaps, not errors).
• content_body is a faithful local rendering, but unusual templates in old eras may render as raw wikitext in rare cases.
• day and set_time are null where the archive format never recorded them.