Happy New Year and welcome to the first WikiProject Schools newsletter.

You are receiving this because you are either registered at the project, or have either created or significantly contributed to a schools article, or have contributed to a daughter project. If you are not yet a participant, now is the time to consider joining here - it will help you get some assistance on pages you create or work on.
Our aim is to improve and standardize school-related articles and make them easier to create. Ultimately, the goal is to bring notable articles up to feature article standards. This project covers all articles about schools, school districts, and some general articles such as School. It doesn't cover universities, but it does include sixth form colleges, and schools, generally in the UK, that use "college" in their name, but are actually primary or secondary schools.

NOTE: If you have finished your school article, you might like to consider taking on some maintenance tasks for the clean-up drive to be announced for 2011. If you don't have so much time, never mind, we thank you for all your valued contributions, and hope you'll be back again soon. Do however consider adding your name to the opt-out list if you don't want to be pestered with future newsletters.

• The project main page has been condensed, and much of the support material has been transferred to dedicated sub pages. Banners and templates have been updated, and shortcuts added to the side bar navigator.
• Several school articles were promoted this year including Malvern College, one of England's most prestigious private 11 - 18 schools. The Good Article sets a benchmark for the quality, and demonstrates how important teamwork is.
• The Judd School was the first UK school to achieve Featured Article status.
• A scuffle almost broke out in the school yard over infobox parameters, but a mature approach from Schools Project members prevented any physical injury. Please check the project page and be sure to use (or that you have used) the appropriate box.
• The list of participants has been parsed, so we can see who is actually doing what.

People in schools

Remember that we generally do not include the names of school staff even if all the girls in Grade 10 think the sports master is awesome, or the canteen supervisor cooks the best fish 'n chips in the county. We never mention individual students by name, and we usually leave the name of the principal in the infobox only where it can be easily updated by routine maintenance. If you want to include staff or alumni in a school article, they are just as subject to the strict rules for notability and sourcing as stand-alone biography pages. See Biography of Living Persons.

Help

Don't hesitate to ask for it if you need it, but

We urgently need project coordinators. We need to attack some long overdue tasks. If you have time to help out, please add your name HERE, and we'll be along to discuss what you can do.

Happy editing, and thanks to everyone else who has contributed to our articles.

New project resources

Before making any major edits to articles or stubs, please be sure to read the updated How To Make and Improve School Articles. It should be referred to often, and will be your main stop for most maintenance tasks. We recommend keeping the page on your watchlist.

These lists will help:

• Main project page
• Alumni
• Article guidelines
• Participants
• Project category
• Portal
• Possible school AfDs
  • Organisation, corporation, or product
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Schools

• Article requests
• Assessment
• Newsletter

Specific aims

• Monitor the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
• Infoboxes - many articles need infoboxes adding, changing or completing.
• References The list of stubs needing expansion needs constant attention. Please take a look and see if you can help. One small edit, such as adding a reference section and reference, to an article each session would make a big difference. Be sure any images you upload have a correct FUR and copyright notice.

New Page Patrol

• Add the right stub to short articles
• How to use the article talk page to improve school articles
• How to add categories
• How to add footnotes and their inline references

Discussion

We need your feedback on all aspects of school articles including layout, style, policy, images, text, images, templates, categories, stubs, You can discuss any of the topics in this newsletter at: WT:WPSCHOOLS.