Education/Archive/News/Publication Guidelines

From Outreach Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Newsletter content preparation[edit]

Why do we write newsletter posts?

The education newsletter will focus on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. It will help us learn from each other and celebrate each other's successes.

How to write a good newsletter post?

A newsletter post can take the form of an announcement, a press release, a status update, or even an op-ed about a relevant topic that you care about.

A newsletter post shouldn't be so short that it doesn't communicate a story. For example, if the post is about an event, it shouldn't be one or two lines saying that the event was held. The reader should get answers to several questions, like when was the event held, where, who attended, what was interesting about this event? A good post will not leave the reader with many questions in their mind. On the other hand, the post shouldn't so long that it looks like a blog post. If you have a lot of ideas, details, lessons learned that will take several pages on paper, you could think about writing a blog post.

A good newsletter post will be accompanied by photos, links to pages about the event, course pages, user pages, etc. You can also include quotations from some people you are talking about or someone who is attending the course, event, etc.

The newsletter content leaders will be happy to review your drafts, co-write the post with you, or even write the post for you after you give them some details about the topic you would like to cover. To get help with your post drafting, please contact one of the content leaders listed on this page.

How to prepare the "In the News" section?

The "In the News" section of the newsletter lists news shared about Wikipedia in education in different media publications. It can also be a place to share relevant news that could help the community better plan and implement education projects.

To find news about Wikipedia in education, Google alerts can help you. To do that, please follow the following steps:

  1. Go to google alerts website.
  2. In the search box type a key word for the alert to track, like "Wikipedia Education Program", "Wikipedia in Education", "Wikipedia student", "Wikipedia school", "Wikipedia university", etc. You can create more than one alert for as many key words you want to track.
  3. You can edit every alert to choose how often do you want to get emails from this alert, what source do you want google to use: news only, blogs only, all, etc, and many other options.
  4. Google when send you emails whenever there is something published on the web about the key words you logged.
  5. Open the articles google found and sent to you, make sure each one of them is mainly talking about Wikipedia in Education and dismiss articles that don't meet this criteria.
  6. Go to the newsroom and add a link to the article you found to the "In the News" Submissions.
  7. You can add a very short summary about the article you are adding. One or two lines will be great.

Newsletter publication[edit]

How to Publish, “This Month in Education” as of 2017 Follow the steps outlined:

  1. Gather the articles
  2. Copy edit the articles
  3. Put together the publication
  4. Post the Newsletter
  5. Distribute the Newsletter

Deadlines[edit]

  • Request articles from the community: 3rd of the month
  • Last date for community to submit:  20th of the month
  • Content review and volunteer engagement: 22nd of the month
  • Publication: Last day of the month

Gather the articles[edit]

Post the following on the WEP facebook group, @WikiEducationProgram on Twitter and to [education@lists.wikimedia.org]

Tweet #1 New Education Newsletter to be published. Hurry up! Last date to submit your Education program story is (month) 20: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/Newsroom

Tweet #2 Are you a Wikimedia Education Program leader? Submit your program story for the Education Newsletter by (month) 20: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/Newsroom

Fb #1 If you are a program leader and have something exciting to share about your Education Program, hurry up and submit it by (month) 20: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/Newsroom

Fb 2 Hello program leaders, Do you have an exciting story from your education program? It can still make the Education Newsletter. Last date for submission is (month) 20. Hurry up and submit it here: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/Newsroom

Mailing list

Title: Wikimedia Education Newsletter: Call for submission (Last date: _____ 20)

Hello all, I hope you all are having an excellent week! As you know, we publish “This Month in Education” every month on the last day of the month. Submissions for the next issue are due by the 20th. We want to hear your news, so make sure you get it into the newsroom by the deadline.

Best regards,

Copy edit the articles[edit]

When you copy edit, look for and correct major mistakes in grammar and spelling. Don’t nitpick, as our community is not made up of native speakers, and we want to keep the authentic voice of the author intact. Try to keep consistency in the wording, for example: edit-a-thon instead of editathon.

Put together the publication[edit]

The following steps will help  you put together the publication into its final draft.

Create the Newsletter and Move the Articles[edit]

Go to the newsroom

  1. Find the articles for the publication of “This Month in Education” under “current drafts”
  2. Move the drafts to the following (bolded words change month to month): Education/Newsletter/current month_current year/title of article Eg. Education/News/Drafts/Education at WMCON17 will be moved to Education/Newsletter/April 2017/Education at WMCON17

Go to the newsletter template: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Education_newsletter

  1. click edit
  2. copy all of the code
  3. create the article for the current month by using https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/ and adding the month and year at the end. Ex. https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/Feb_2017
  4. paste the code into the new article
  5. update this line: Volume | Issue | Month
  6. save


Add the “featured article” under featured topic:[edit]

  1. Click edit under “featured topic”
  2. Add the article title
  3. Paste the summary from the article’s page
  4. Change the image to an image from the article’s page
  5. Add the links where necessary
  6. Preview your edits
  7. Click save
  8. Add the title to the table of contents next to the correct anchor

Add the articles to the “from the community” section:[edit]

  1. Click edit under each article heading in “from the community”
  2. Add the article title
  3. Paste the summary from the article’s page
  4. Add the links where necessary
  5. Change the image to an image from the article’s page
  6. Preview your edits
  7. Click save
  8. Add the title to the table of contents next to the correct anchor

Add the articles to the “from the team” section:[edit]

  1. Click edit under each article heading in “from the team”
  2. Add the article title
  3. Paste the summary from the article’s page
  4. Add the links where necessary
  5. Change the image to an image from the article’s page
  6. Preview your edits
  7. Click save
  8. Add the title to the table of contents next to the correct anchor

Add the articles to the “in the news” section:[edit]

  1. Check the newsroom for articles under the heading “In the News Submissions”
  2. Click edit under each article heading in “from the team”
  3. Add the article title and link to article
  4. Paste the summary from the newsroom
  5. Add the links where necessary
  6. Preview your edits
  7. Click save
  8. Add the title to the table of contents next to the correct anchor

Change article categories from "draft" to month of publication[edit]

  1. Click edit
  2. Find the category at the bottom of the article that shows as "Education/newsletter/drafts"
  3. Edit to match the month and year of publication: "Education/newsletter/MONTH YEAR"

The first edit for the newsletter will create the category, generating a new page. Just let it be created (no text input necessary). The category will then fill up with links to the article as they are changed to the MONTH YEAR.

Post the Newsletter[edit]

  1. Go to Education/News
  2. Below the __NOTOC__ update the month in the following line of code: {{:Education/Newsletter/Feb_2017}}
  3. edit the news feed on the main page
    1. Search for: Template:Education Portal/Newsletter/Headlines
    2. Then edit the Headlines page
    3. Replace the previous issue’s links with the current issue’s links
    4. Save the Headlines page
    5. The Latest news section on the homepage of the Education portal will automatically update. You may, however, have to purge the page/bypass the cache.
  1. Archive the past issue
    1. Open the archives
    2. edit the section for this year
    3. add a link to the most recent past edition.
      1. Make sure that you are not on the main newsletter page, but actually on the page for that specific issue; you're in the right place if there's a month and a year in the URL, like this: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/April_2014.

Distribute the Newsletter[edit]

The newsletter is distributed through Mass Message, the education list, facebook, and twitter.


  1. To send the newsletter across wikis, you need the "MassMessage sender" user right (see the list of people who have it). You can request it at m:WM:RFH.
  2. Once you have the MassMessage sender user right, to send the message, go to: m:Special:MassMessage
  3. In the page containing list of pages to leave a message on, type: Global message delivery/Targets/This Month in Education
  4. In the subject of the message (also used as the edit summary), type: This Month in Education: [Month Year]
    Copy: This Month in Education: April 2024
  5. In the body of the MassMessage, paste the code (i.e. what you have obtained above with one of the three methods).
  6. Remember to sign the MassMessage with the delivery system's signature and timestamp, using 4 tildes: ~~~~.
  7. Add the following copy at the bottom:
    <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">[[m:Education/Newsletter/About|About ''This Month in Education'']] · [[m:Global message delivery/Targets/This Month in Education|Subscribe/Unsubscribe]] · [[m:MassMessage|Global message delivery]] · For the team: [[:m:User:Romaine|Romaine]] ~~~~~</div>
  8. Click "Preview" and then, if it looks good, send it! :)
    Note: Even you're sending a multilingual newsletter, you'll only see the English version when you preview, because Meta is in English.


Sharing the newsletter on social media accounts[edit]

  1. Post a link to the WEP Facebook group.
  2. Send a message to education@wikimedia.org to request sharing it on the Education Program Twitter account.

Page archives: Education/News/Publication Guidelines/archive

Page archives: archived as of 4.21.17

Retrieved from "https://outreach.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Education/Archive/News/Publication_Guidelines&oldid=220703"