We’re preparing a bigger survey that will see wider distribution, but to help me calibrate it and know what I want to ask, I want to run some preliminary questions here.

Your answers will help us improve the wiki in the short-term, so thanks for participating! You can simply comment below or send me a DM if you want to remain somewhat anonymous.

Section 1

  • Do you have an account on ProleWiki?
  • If not, why?
  • Were you aware that having an account on ProleWiki allows you to edit pages and participate in the editor community?

Section 2

  • How often do you visit ProleWiki in a week or month?
  • What keeps you coming back to ProleWiki?
  • What impact has ProleWiki had on you? Either positive or negative (please detail)

Section 3

  • Where do you feel ProleWiki is lacking?
  • Please take a page you remember that you didn’t entirely like and provide your criticism of it, not only on the content but on the phrasing as well. Please don’t choose a stub (we know they’re too short 🙏)
  • How would you rate the language and tone used on ProleWiki from 1 to 10? With 1 being casual (as if between friends), and 10 being academic (as if presenting a paper to an auditorium).
  • Do you perceive ProleWiki to be a credible encyclopedia?

Bonus question: how would you like to see ProleWiki evolve?

Be as honest as you can, I won’t take it personally.

Hexbearers can answer too now that we’re federated btw, but this remains a small-scale internal survey until the real big one gets published.

  • nephs
    2·
    1 year ago

    I want to answer this survey, but it’s not the easiest of tasks on mobile.

    No account. I didn’t know that would be enough to edit it, but I don’t think I’d have anything to contribute.

    Probably once a month, if much? It’s hard to find which is the most relevant read/page on any given day/week. Featured articles could be update more frequently, based on current world events. I’m just happy it exists, I’d like to contribute more to that kind of initiative, the positive impact is that it got me thinking about how to contribute.

    I feel it lacks a audio mode. Those articles are really text heavy, if we had a one click download of audio version for podcast I’d be very happy. I’m working on something along these lines I’ll share when it becomes slightly useful.

    I think the tone is great for us, but it may be a barrier for people that have no understanding of our terminology and world view. Some introductory articles could help with the gap, maybe a guide to prolewiki world views, and how to read our content.

    It feels credible, but sometimes I feel it misses the overview of a subject I could get from Wikipedia. It contains only differences, not the full picture, maybe? Do you think it could link to Wikipedia articles to help explain context, where relevant, or is nothing in Wikipedia salvageable? It could contain observations for context on how to read Wikipedia’s linked articles too.

    I appreciate the energy you put in this work, and the results of it!

    • CriticalResist8OPA
      1·
      1 year ago

      Hey, thanks for the feedback! There’s many ways to contribute, even just proofreading or adding sources is a great help!

      For your other suggestions, it’s actually stuff we’ve looked at before so this probably means we’re on the right track.

      • TTS: we’ve looked at it but there’s no ready-made solution that integrate with mediawiki. Also if we want something that updates, we’d probably have to pay for an API so that every time you make an edit to a page, it recompiles a TTS file instantly, making it always up to date. It’s possible to make these files manually and link them on each page, but they would get outdated pretty quickly. I wonder if there’s other solutions we don’t know about though.

      • We’ve been thinking about opening a Portal page for like basic marxist concepts or just theory, much like wikipedia has. It’s technically not difficult at all (it’s just a page in a Portal: namespace and you dress it up however you want), but putting them front and center so that people check them is more difficult. We also have bluelinks though which should redirect to hopefully beginner-level explanations of like imperialism, the bourgeoisie, etc.

      • Yeah, that’s a problem in some pages. They’re trying too hard to dispel propaganda rather than just lay out the facts. We try not to copy from Wikipedia as much as possible though because it’s just so anticommunist, and their sources are always going to be liberal drivel. Like even if you want to use one specific part of their source to support your point, if people actually go read the reference itself, it’s going to contain some redfash tankie bullshit. I do sometimes get inspiration from Wikipedia to see how they introduce a topic or what they call it when I’m missing the word, but otherwise we actually made it a soft rule not to plagiarize from wikipedia or other encyclopedias lol (also because we are able to come up with our own material and don’t need to simply copy from other sources to talk for us)