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!
Hmm, I can give you an answer from my perspective as a long-time editor.
Sometimes a guiding thread (the narrative if you will) in a page will only start becoming clear after you actually put everything down on paper. These are questions like what do we want to say? Beyond simply exposing everything about a topic, how do we want to present this information? In what order? What do we want the reader to get out of it, what do we want them to think after they’ve read the page?
It’s education and education follows a cursus, which we are I think slowly moving towards with ProleWiki.
It all makes a narrative, and we see that on Wikipedia already. For famous figures for example, they’ll start with a short introductory paragraph that sums up what they are most known for. Then, the very first section is their biography, going into their major life events and how that influenced their work, but not necessarily into the work itself (like for artists if the album was platinum certified they might not mention that here). Then they go into personal life, such as controversies or simply who they are as a person. Finally they talk about their achievements or what they’re known for. For an artists this could be their discography, for a political figure that could be their policies.
This all forms a coherent narrative (to some extent at least) that takes you from a clear start to a clear finish.
But certainly the journey begins with the first step and you need to start somewhere.
As for editing on Prolewiki, you can also start with smaller edits (if you request an account and it gets approved of course) instead of going straight for a huge page. Joining will also allow you to ask the other editors for help on this project.
Our editorial guidelines are essentially informed by two things: our principles and the content on our other pages. We take the position that if something is written in our pages, then we have to either uphold it, or change it. Anything else doesn’t make sense. So in your case, while I don’t know what you plan to write, as an editor you would inform your writing and references based on what’s on our Anarchism page for example, or USSR / Russian SSR / Ukrainian SSR page regarding Makhnovia. It’s easier in practice, I’m going very deep in the cross-referential here.
Thanks for the thorough reply.
Having put some thought to it, I reckon what I really need to do is to sit down and pour the contents of my brain out into the written word and then chase down the relevant sources rather than having a head full of facts and trying to make sense of all of it in my mind.
I think what I might do as a start is to create a specific community and drop posts with citations into there and then I will either look at learning the ropes with ProleWiki or I’ll start shaping those disparate posts into a document. If I don’t manage to get that far, at least with the posts that I’ll draft with relevant citations will be fair game if a ProleWiki editor wants to take my work and incorporate it into entries there.
I think by the time I’m done it will be worthwhile having dedicated entry on Makhnovia because, although the historical scholarship is pretty sparse (and there’s a few primary sources that are in Russian or Ukrainian which haven’t been translated, making them inaccessible to me), I think that there’s a lot of important detail that needs to be covered from a materialist angle. Tbh there’s probably enough material that would warrant the Makhnovist secret police having their own separate entry.