Creating articles, overview

The Khan Academy mission is to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere. In this unit, we will cover article creation, which is one of the ways we deliver knowledge.

When you are producing an article, keep in mind that we are reaching an incredibly diverse audience of people from all over the world and there is the possibility that your article will be translated to other languages.

We want to make sure that our content not only helps people feel that Khan Academy understands them and believes they matter, but also helps everyone imagine a positive future where it doesn’t matter who you are as long as you have a willingness to learn and grow.

Some things to keep in mind:

Unless there’s no other word available to convey the intended meaning, avoid using gendered language.

Do not “gender” professions, such as stewardess. Use flight attendant instead.

There are also some words and phrases in all languages that have racist origins, and we should avoid using them. Some of these are obvious, others are less obvious so when in doubt look it up.

Avoid reproducing stereotypes as, for example, girls aren’t good at math or science, or Asian kids are very smart and hardworking.

Shake up your characters to reflect our belief that anyone can learn, be and do anything.

Keep that in mind when you are creating the articles.

As much as possible, our content should be accessible to people with disabilities, so when including images and videos take into account both color blindness and vision impairments in general. We'll cover more of this in the next article "Best Practices for Inclusive Content".

One way to aid accessibility is by checking if the colors you choose are accessible on our color pallet.

Use positive examples and scenarios when possible—Khan Academy should be a fun place to learn, and our examples and scenarios, especially for content aimed at young audiences, should paint a picture of a positive world.

So use positive scenarios avoiding violence, guns, drugs, physical or emotional abuse, sex, nudity, and negative/cavalier portrayals of mental health issues.

Whenever possible, insert examples of different cultures and eras. Avoid cultural jokes.

There are many tools you can use within articles to improve the learning experience: explanation widgets, videos, images, graphs, tables, etc. (watch the video Formatting and widgets in articles).

Use the staging areas in CMS (puppies) to test out these features for yourself!