Commons:Wiki Loves Earth/WLE Resources Center/MassMessage for promotion

HOW TO USE MASS MESSAGE FOR PROMOTION

MassMessage is one of the most powerful tools for promoting Wikimedia content campaigns, including Wiki Loves Earth.

📖If you want to use it, you can email the international team at wle-team@wikimedia.org.ua, and we will prepare it for you. But if you want to try it yourself, here is the detailed guide:

GUIDE

To send a MassMessage campaign, you need three components:

• Text of the message;
• List of its recipients;
• A person to actually send out the message (only admins of a wiki project can technically do it).

Traditionally, for international WLE, the international team can do all the work to distribute the messages, except for translating messages into local languages (which is done by local teams).

1. Text of the message

Traditionally, the organizing team creates a template message for local teams. Check out the example here.

Once we have a template message, we can offer you help with distribution for your country. You need to translate our template message into your own language to do this.

2. List of recipients

Although the message could potentially be sent to any specific group of Wikimedia Commons users, to avoid spamming, we typically send it to users who’ve participated in the specific country’s contest before (if the contest is held for the first time, we can check other photo campaigns in this country — e.g., Wiki Loves Monuments or Wiki Loves Africa — https://wikiloves.toolforge.org/).

• To get the list of participants from previous years of a specific local contest, we use Quarry.

• Here’s a model query for Italy.

Following this example, create your query, insert the needed data, and submit (see detailed instructions below).

Once the query is executed, we can import data (see screenshot 1) — and copy-paste it into a wiki page. Here’s the result.

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  Screenshot 1

Create a query for your country

How do you create a query for your country? It’s really simple since we already have the model query — you don’t need to know SQL; a bit of copy-pasting will work.

Step 0. Make sure you’re logged in to Quarry under your wiki account;

Step 1. Fork the existing query (see screenshot 2);

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  Screenshot 2

Step 2. Change the relevant lines in the query — name of the country (and years if relevant, and name of the contest if relevant).

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  Screenshot 3

Step 3. Execute query;

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  Screenshot 4

Step 4. Profit! Follow the same step discussed above — export the data and copy-paste it to a wiki page.

Who can send the message

Only the admins of a wiki project (in WLE’s case, Wikimedia Commons) have the right to send the message.

• One option is to ask an admin personally; for example, user Romaine is on the international organizing team in 2024;

• Also, there’s always an option to file a public request on the admin's noticeboard on Commons (see, for example).

Give the person you’re asking to send the message the first two components:

1) exact text of the message;

2) link to a wiki page with the list of receivers.

Actually, sending out the message is pretty simple and quick for the admin once all data is available, so this isn’t a big ask. But be sure to follow up and check whether the task has been completed:)

Comments and ideas

Let's make WLE visible everywhere!

If you have any more questions or need help, feel free to approach us at wle-team@wikimedia.org.ua.

If you want to add your suggestions, questions, or ideas for this instruction, please leave them here.