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!
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