Education/News/Publication Guidelines

Newsletter content preparation

Why do we write newsletter posts?

The education newsletter will focus on sharing about Wikimedia Education programs that involve the use of Wikipedia and its sisters projects: 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 be 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:

Go to google alerts website.
In the search box type a key word for the alert to track, like "Wikipedia Education Program", "Wikipedia in Education", "Wikipedia student", "Wikipedia school", "Wikimedia Education", "Wikipedia university", etc. You can create more than one alert for as many key words you want to track.
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.
Google when send you emails whenever there is something published on the web about the key words you logged.
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.
Go to the newsroom and add a link to the article you found to the "In the News" Submissions.
You can add a very short summary about the article you are adding. One or two lines will be great.

How to write the newsletter article

We have made a few changes to the previous template of the Education newsletter. We want to follow a standardised procedure for all articles, so please do not make changes to the design while submitting the articles.

All font sizes, color and font types are pre-decided in the newsletter design.
The background of the title of article is highlighted by the #00A7E2 color, which education team is following.
Add author's name in the article.
Please provide a two-three line summary of the work, which will give a glimpse to the reader about the work in News section.
Please add images just after the summary. If you have more than two images, follow the gallery template in the newsletter template. If you're adding only one image, Please keep the image on the right side of the article. Like [[File:Example|thumb|right|Example]]
Add the main article after the images.
We have introduced new tags called Social media channel or hashtags. If you have worked with any institutions and want us to tag you and the institution while sharing the articles from our social media channels, please share the username or similarly hashtags.
There are some options for categories, see if your newsletter article falls under any one of them. Please add it, which will help the reader to access newsletter related to those categories in future.

Newsletter publication

How to Publish, “This Month in Education” :

Gather the articles
Copy edit the articles
Put together the publication
Post the Newsletter
Distribute the Newsletter

Deadlines

Request articles from the community: 10^th of the month
Last date for community to submit: 26^th of the month
Publication: 28^th of the month

Education newsletter template

We updated the design of the Education newsletter in November 2018, the team has made this newsletter template more reader friendly and to be easily readable through different devices. We are using three different colors to highlight the headlines of the Education letter, and has less links or texts to avoid the previous complex designs. Readers could select their area of interest by going through the summary provided.

How to design the Newsletter article

Follow the colors of the design.
Articles should be represented in two columns, headlines in F4AC45, 92BFB1 followed by CA054D.
Even number of articles to be equally distributed in two columns.
Odd number of articles, the extra articles will be in the first column.

This Month in Education

Volume x • Issue xx • Month Year

Contents • Single page view • Subscribe

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