Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Guidelines

These are the guidelines for scheduling and maintaining the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD), a section on the Main Page that is automatically updated every day with one or more featured pictures, accompanied by a blurb. The general steps to schedule a POTD are as follows:

1. Choose a date in the future from the subpages linked at Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Archive that does not yet have a featured picture scheduled.
2. Select a featured picture to be the POTD (see #Scheduling for details). Images that have a connection to the chosen date (e.g. birthdays or event anniversaries) are often selected.
3. Add {{Picture of the day|YYYY-MM-DD}} to the local file-description page for the featured picture. If the picture is a re-run (which should hardly ever happen, because there is a huge backlog that have not yet been scheduled), add an additional date parameter to the existing template.
4. Create and complete the POTD subpage, including a blurb (see #Writing the blurb for details).
5. Place a note on the talk page of the bolded article using {{subst:UpcomingPOTD|[File:]Example.png|YYYY-MM-DD|[optional comments]}}. A header is automatically added and the message will automatically be signed. There are two slightly different layouts that can be used; see the template page for further details.
6. Notify the nominator and uploader of the featured picture using {{subst:NotifyPOTD|[optional salutation]|[File:]Example.png|YYYY-MM-DD|[optional comments]}}. A header is automatically added and the message will automatically be signed. There are two slightly different layouts that can be used; see the template page for further details.
7. Approximately 26 hours before 00:00 UTC on the scheduled date, a bot (currently AnomieBOT) will create the protected version (if it cannot, it will place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day; in that case, it will have to be done manually – see #Protected version for details).

These steps can be automated using the POTDhelper user script.

New contributors may wish to start by simply writing blurbs for scheduled POTDs at Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Archive that do not yet have them, but please follow the guidelines at #Writing the blurb, in particular ensuring that all facts mentioned in the blurb are mentioned and cited in either the linked bolded article or the image file's description page.