Section 1

• No.

• I’m considering requesting an account, but I feel like I still have a quite a bit to learn until then. I occasionally draft and re-draft answers to the verification questions in order to force me to study a bit. I guess I also don’t fully understand the application process. For instance, is there room to appeal if my verification answers contain some glaring mistakes but I recognise and correct those?

• Yes, which is why I want to create an account. In all honesty, my most common contributions at my current confidence level would only be fixing a couple of typos, grammar errors and transcription errors and some phrasing that I’ve noticed while reading. Eventually I might also want to help out with some pages relevant to the South Atlantic world.

Section 2

• I visit it about once a day.

• A certain admin’s reading list ;). Besides that I also like to check if there are pages for historical events and people that are currently mired in lib propaganda, and sometimes I also just click on “Random Page” just to learn something new while on the bus. It’s like wikipedia dumpster diving but without the dumpster level content.

• Very positive, it’s much easier to get a shallow understanding of things I explicitly avoided reading about because it’d take ages to form a critical opinion of. Before then I had to literally check the sources on wikipedia all the time before trusting the content there and it took a lot of time to find out that yet another “commonly known fact” is complete bunk. It’s also nice to have so many good references compiled in a single page for ease of reference.

Section 3

• I think one point that is unequally developed is the Country Pages. Some countries like Brazil have huge and well written pages despite not being the first thing I think of from an ML wiki, but then Syria (which is usually a point of modern interest and discussion) has a tiny page and doesn’t go into much detail of the ideology and functioning of Assad’s government.

I also don’t really like how sometimes there are whole paragraphs without citations, sometimes even referencing authors but not when exactly they said that thing. This one on the last paragraph is a mild example of that.

• I don’t have any individual page that I have a particular issue with, besides lack of content. I guess I could make a small complaint that Cuba’s page is a bit bloated on the History section (which I think could become its own very interesting page), with the other sections very small. Since Cuba is geographically is the ML state right in the middle of the NATO domain, I think they could use a bit more of love there.

• I’d say it “reads like wikipedia” which I guess is around a 7 on the academic scale. Formal enough to be taken seriously, but still accessible enough that I can read it without having to look up definitions of words.

• In so far as encyclopedias can be credible, it’s at the top. Having gone through my fair share of those, I don’t think that any of them can be the absolute most credible and neither that they should strive for it. That is why I generally avoid encyclopedias that don’t provide lots of citations for their statements so that they can easily be verified by other editors and users. But Prolewiki is usually better at this in the citation front than most Wikipedia non-STEM pages, so it’s at least a good start. Obviously I wouldn’t put it as a reference in an article, but I would acknowledge it as the starting point of research or link it to casually interested folks.

Bonus question: It’s a bit of “more is better,” because I think the only issue right now is it being small sometimes. I don’t know how the internal process works, but if there isn’t already, I think it might be cool to have a “Help wanted” list of pages that could use a bit more love.

Extra bonus questions:

• Yes, and they’re much better to browse than marxists.org

• They’re pretty neat! I just think that it falls apart a little bit after you actually click a card and are met with a ton of "Library: " links. Some of those are obvious on what they are, but others have specific titles that are hard to put in context without previous knowledge. Mao’s work for example can have some cryptic titles like the “Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung” which I didn’t even know was the one I knew as just “little red book” (also it seems that the one on the PW is broken). I think they could use some small (1 paragraph) prefaces to at least understand what they are about at a glance. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some wiki-like website that had a category page with a feature like that, but I can’t recall which and don’t know if it’s possible with mediawiki.

Edit: Just want to point out that despite the criticisms, it is no joke the best website I’ve learned about this year, tied only with lemmygrad itself.