Global Collaboration/Newsletter/Issues/Manual

How to distribute the Collaboration Newsletter. If you have already written Tech/News, you know the drill.

Daily tasks

Add #user-notice-collaboration on any Phabricator task that should be announced.

Create the newsletter

1. Inform the Collaboration team about the future newsletter.
2. Create a new newsletter, with the following title format: Collaboration/Newsletter/Issues/YYYY/MM
3. Copy-paste the template on that new newsletter.

Fill the newsletter

1. Look at new stuff that has been added to #user-notice-collaboration on Phabricator or on the Collaboration/Deployment planning page. Make sure you're looking at all tasks, not just open ones.
2. Add a new line for each new topic. Sentences must be short to be easy to translate.
3. Move items you have added from the "Announce in next Collaboration Newsletter" column to the "Recently announced in Collaboration Newsletter" column on the #user-notice board in Phabricator.
4. Ask for an external opinion about items you have added, by sending the link to that issue to the Collaboration team. Start the count-down: the newsletter will be finalized in one week.

Finalization and translations

1. Prepare the content for translation. You'll need "Translation admin" rights, or a Translation admin to approve your changes. We use the Translate extension; see how to set up a content page for translation by adding translate tags.
2. Request the help of Wikimedia translators through their mailing list at translators-l@lists.wikimedia.org, to translate the early draft of the newsletter.
3. Freeze the newsletter and notify translators on their mailing list, and highlight the changes between the early draft and the final version. If no changes were made, send a message anyway to let them know the content is now final.
   • Translators will need time to translate: at least, ask them on Tuesday or Friday so they will have time to translate over the week end. Give them one week to translate if the newsletter has a lot of content.
4. Distribute the newsletter.

Distribute the newsletter

The distribution is quite similar to the Tech/News one.

1. Do the final polish
   1. Open all translations on Meta and check for red links, in case there was an error during the translation.
   2. Remove the "deadline" template, and mark for translation.
2. Generate the multilingual text of the newsletter
   1. Go to Collaboration/Newsletter/Sandbox and open the edit source window:
   2. Replace month and year with the ones that are being sent out (Collaboration/Newsletter/Issues/2024/11). This uses the Assemble multilingual message module.
   3. After the month and year, insert language codes for languages that have at least partial translations (+50%), for instance fr|ko|ja|pl|pt|uk. Do not add en for the English version; as the default language, it is automatically included.
   4. Save your edit
3. Test the message
   1. Manually test the message on a few wikis (e.g. on your user page) using the whole generated text, and look for issues (red links, line breaks, etc.). You can do this in two different ways:
      • Copy/paste the whole generated text manually on a few of your user pages, and preview without saving;
        • Check that it begins with <section begin=, ends with a timestamp, and that it uses the right edition (both text and link);
      • Use Special:MassMessage for a dry run using a test distribution list (see example); the process is the same as for the actual delivery (described further below), except for the target list.
   2. A good rule of thumb is to check:
      • on the English Wikipedia
      • on another language available
      • on another language not available (defaulting to English)
      • on an RTL wiki
      • and on a community page in a localized namespace.
4. Launch the delivery
   1. Open Special:MassMessage in another tab or window
      • Page containing list of pages to leave a message on: Collaboration/Newsletter/Subscribers
      • Subject of the message (also used as the edit summary): [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Collaboration/Newsletter/Issues/2024/11|Collaboration products newsletter: 2024-11]] (update the link and description with the actual week number)
      • Body of the message: The whole multilingual text generated earlier.
   2. Click on the Preview button on the page; only the English text will show, because it's Meta-Wiki's language
   3. Do a final check, and if everything looks good, click on the Send button on the page
5. Thank the translators!