Hello, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself and seek input from our community regarding a new feature we’re considering implementing in the Prolewiki Library.
I’m the new Library Maintainer for Prolewiki. My responsibilities are to fix any incomplete library works, make the library easy to navigate, collect feedback and analyze how you all use it to make it better. Essentially, I’m here to ensure that the library functions smoothly and is user-friendly.
Lately at Prolewiki we have been exploring the idea of adding notes and introductions to the books, articles and other works in the library in the form of footnotes and an introduction paragraph. This serves a couple of purposes: firstly, it allows us to bring awareness to mistakes in the text, and secondly, it provides contextual information to deepen comprehension.
This is ONLY about adding notes and introductions, we would NOT be removing or changing anything from works we upload like the MIA Does! With that in mind we have some questions we would like to ask to get feedback from you about this feature.
QUESTIONS
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Do you believe that having footnotes/introductions for corrections and context would enhance the overall quality of content in our library and make it more trustworthy?
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Would you consider using Prolewiki more often for the same books and articles that you can also find on other websites if we provided helpful notes or introductions?
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Do you think they should be used solely for corrections and context, or should they also allow for opinions and interpretations?
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How concerned are you about potential abuse or misuse such as biased commentary or incorrect information? Would this possibility make you less likely to use our library?
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Are there any specific examples of books, articles, or works in the library that you believe would greatly benefit from this feature at this time? Please provide some examples.
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How do you think we could name the Prolewiki introduction paragraph to make it clear this is a ProleWiki addition?
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What additional suggestions or concerns do you have about the implementation of this feature in our library?
Thank you for your feedback comrades!!!
Yes, it’d possibly help make older historical materials more accessible to modern audiences and also avoid issues with hosting texts which have severe errors in them, but are overall useful for other reasons.
Definitely! It’d be a great advantage over the MIA for example, which does barely any effort to contextualise their texts. We also have a problem with internet archives where a ton of older texts have some 4 “prefaces to the German edition of 19xx,” all of which with a lot of historical context mostly relevant only for the time of those prefaces, and it seems fair that we have some for our times and context as well.
It’d be hard to separate this, but one thing I’ve found in some publications was to have a preface for context and a postface for opinions and analysis. But I believe different users will have at least slightly different opinions and interpretations over the material and how it applies to their context of interest, so (resources willing) this could be its own section if there’s a lot of interest from the editorship.
I wouldn’t personally due to trusting the wiki given my experience so far. And since the PW is openly ML less trusting users would at least see those biases up front rather than hidden.
From the ones I read there, Harman’s “How Marxism Works” really could use one, and the Maidan Trials one seems too topical to not do one too, specially with the knowledge of later developments. The Little Red Book is broken right now, but that one is basically a bunch of context-less quotations that are ripe for misinterpretation, so that’d be interesting too after it gets fixed. And one that took me quite a while to get through due to all the historical context I was missing was Lenin’s “What is to be done?” which I’ve read in Portuguese somewhere else.
“Preface to the ProleWiki Edition” sounds nice, maybe add a date.
If footnotes are to be implemented and if it’s feasible, I’d really like if y’all somehow adapted the Wikipedia footnote hover popups, as going to the bottom of the webpage and then back can be really frustrating. And not exactly a suggestion, but I’m curious how this will be applied to large books when compared with small pamphlets. It’s one thing to do a single preface for the Manifesto, quite another to a longer book like Imperialism, so it may or may not be interesting to provide a
Thanks for the feedback! We should have the hover popups already:
Do you have javascript disabled maybe?
Huh, it’s working now. I swear I rechecked while writing and it wasn’t working then, but it must’ve been something on my end because it works on multiple devices now.
I think the code for it is sometimes fickle and doesn’t load properly, it’s weird.