We’re doing something a bit different and holding a Q&A Session on Lemmygrad with ProleWiki!
Any question you have for ProleWiki, ask it here – nothing is off limits. What we do, how we work, our content, who we are… you can ask anything you want.
I know Lemmygrad is like our biggest stronghold (lol) but we’re doing this on Mastodon and Twitter soon so why not extend to the grad as well.
It will most likely be me answering. No time limit though, ask at any time!
One of my biggest criticisms is that prolewiki doesn’t really seem to have the neutral tone that you expect to see in an encyclopedia. Is that a specific choice or is it just something y’all still need to work on?
That’s a good question that needs a few layers to make a full answer!
To get it out of the way: it’s a conscious choice that we naturally grew into with time. We realized pretty quickly that there was no such thing as no bias, all you could do was obfuscate it. Wikipedia is super biased, they just hide it behind tons of rules and their “no POV” language that’s always in the passive voice. So we chose to wear it on our sleeves; our ideas are already fringe, presenting them in a palatable manner to try and look like “one of the good communists” would only distil marxism into meaninglessness, if you’re following me so far. We need to use the words and we need to make it clear what we believe in and what we’re talking about, otherwise what would separate us from the more lefty articles on Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia?
With that settled all the way back in 2020, we also realized quickly enough that we could not be a catch-all marxist encyclopedia. Forte had originally envisioned it that way IIRC, or at least it wasn’t really set in stone back in the beginning, but it turned out that it was an idea that didn’t work out in practice. Someone made an edit on the PRC page, then someone complained that it was too favourable to the PRC and started an argument to change it. Or someone wanted to make a page on some topic and someone else didn’t want that page to be made, etc. Eventually it just devolved into nonstop arguments in private, on the Telegram group, and nothing got done.
This is my interpretation of the events but getting anything out on prolewiki is better than endlessly discussing about potential stuff we could be doing and never doing it in the end, which is still a problem we have sometimes lol. If we wanted to have yet another struggle session between communists then we could do that anywhere else, we didn’t need prolewiki for it.
This first wave of editors soon lost their hype in the project and we kinda had to rebuild from scratch with a new userbase, with only very few original editors remaining. As it would happen, it was mostly MLs that remained, though we can probably partly attribute that to the fact that Forte and I are MLs. If we’d been Hoxhaists maybe you’d have hoxhapedia right now lol.
From there it took some time to formalize that we wanted to be a solely ML project, but ultimately it was the only way we could move forward and not get bogged down in endless struggle sessions that had played out already in the past.
Regarding the tone of the pages, if we abstract it from potential bias, it’s something that we’re working on. We’re not all necessarily great writers, and there’s a double challenge in that we have to start pages from scratch. Wikipedia, which is the big encyclopedia all others are compared to, has the benefit of having existed for over 20 years and having a large userbase that contributed to their pages, including academics in the early days (they’re leaving now because of the rigid structure to get their edits through).
Some pages could be phrased differently, and I have some in mind actually, but it’s always a fine line and difficult, in my experience. Difficult because you want to convey the idea accurately, but need to phrase it in a way you’ve never done before, which is an indirect, impersonal voice. It gets easier as the page gets fleshed out and some sort of narrative starts to show up, the point where you start to think “this is what we want this page to convey and this is how we want to convey it”. Some of our editors are also not native English speakers and might not know the subtleties needed to convey their writing in a more encyclopedic tone. Some of our pages are also from 2020, back when it was basically a free for all and with no guidelines, you could talk in any way you wanted as we were still trying to find our voice (and I was guilty of that too lol). There’s plans to go through these pages, but there’s so many at this point that I’m not sure we’ll ever get around to that.
But if you can send me a few pages that stuck out to you I can add them to our pile of pages to look at and maybe we’ll take a crack at them!
I’m sure you’re making sure to spell this out for passive observers (I would hope you know I’m not a liberal who thinks that support for the status quo = no bias 🥺), but I really think that wikipedia’s style, with the “no POV” language and the passive voice, is a masterful form of propaganda that we should be striving to emulate in anything that’s supposed to be like an encyclopedia, I understand that we’re at a disadavantage because we don’t have the weight of the status quo to help, but even then I think the tone just naturally leads you to “this is the objective state of reality”.
I get that it’s become a more explicitly ML site (although I would support any efforts in trying to make it more generally marxist, I think if y’all just used the system of wikipedia where very contentious topics like the PRC, DPRK, etc. are restricted pages that are even harder to edit would help a lot with that), but like as an example of a page that leaks condescension and utterly fails to portray a neutral tone is the one for Trostky. I dislike how it just utterly disregards the huge contributions he had towards the establishment of the USSR, and it’s just too explicitly sectarian (please note: I’m no fan of how Trotsky conducted himself in his power struggle within the USSR, and especially after he lost it, but it’s extremely distasteful how the prolewiki page treats him despite that). You can paint Trostky in a bad light without just about explicitly calling him a fascist in the very opening paragraph.
I will give as a suggestion, I would prioritize the most popular and controversial topics like him, China, DPRK, even Stalin, etc. to fix the tone of these, because that’s where the neutral tone is most useful imo.
Also, thanks for such a thorough and well thought out response!
Yeah no worries, it’s just part of my standard answer when we get the question lol.
The strength Wikipedia has is the wide breadth of editors it has managed to acquire as well as the money behind it. We do have, for example, some editorial guidelines, and while people are great at following most of the rules, there’s one in particular that is completely ignored. On Wikipedia, you would be able to have an admin or veteran editor warn or even ban (they ban very easily) the offenders. On ProleWiki, because we’re such a small community of editors, we ultimately decided it wasn’t worth alienating our few editors who otherwise add a lot of content for a couple rules. I also would love to get an audit body (and this was brought up by some editors too), mostly independent from the editors, whose job is only to check recent changes and notify editors if there’s something they should fix or look at in their commit.
edit: forgot to add, Wikipedia also has a whole TON of sources to pick from from bourgeois media and academics, whereas we have a super limited body of works (although it’s still quite large, especially if we get into Soviet books, we don’t necessarily have access to them or know about them). Sometimes this has forced us to do original research, which means we can’t cite a source for it.
Of course we can still rework articles with or without editorial guidelines, and this actually allows me to segue into the Trotsky article. I took a look at it and basically the most “egregious” parts were added in the first commit all the way back in 2021. We naturally tend to preserve older edits because I think for all of us it would kinda feel like we’re destroying someone else’s work if we took their parts out, so we try to build on them… and if the article grows enough, it eventually starts to look like a patchwork of disparate edits put together. At some point we’ll have to really get into them and rework them from the ground up with all the info that’s in it already.
But I get how it looks to readers, that’s an unfortunate contradiction to which we don’t have an answer yet. Although to fix the Trotsky page we’d have to find someone who actually wants to write about him, which I feel would be very difficult between marxist-leninists lol.
One place where I agree with you is that sometimes we lay it on too thick in the introductory paragraph, or like the introductory paragraph becomes an introductory essay. To me these are all paragraphs that should be developed on and flow naturally while reading the article. It’s true that when reading “Stalin was the democratically elected leader of the USSR”, while not wrong, kinda feels like a “so take that, bourgeois history!”
I’ll write them down somewhere and take a look at them later!
thanks for the effort posts crit! Glad y’all are working on it