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!
Next week it will be “fatherland week” at my uni (because of independence day) , so I’ll have a lot of free time (fatherland week is literally just a 1 week recess). How can I start editing PW during this free time?
I’d like to write articles about the theory books that I’ve read so that I can have more “incentive” to read theory and to actually understand it critically.
edit: I want to write articles both in PT-BR and in EN-US btw.
You’ll need to request an account to do any edits to the wiki, here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount
It’s out of my hands after that as your account request will be passed on to the editors for a vote. I recommend doing it now since it can take some time for your account to be approved.
With a single account you can edit all language instances though. We also have a library space where you could upload books! https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Library
One of my biggest criticisms is that prolewiki doesn’t really seem to have the neutral tone that you expect to see in an encyclopedia. Is that a specific choice or is it just something y’all still need to work on?
That’s a good question that needs a few layers to make a full answer!
To get it out of the way: it’s a conscious choice that we naturally grew into with time. We realized pretty quickly that there was no such thing as no bias, all you could do was obfuscate it. Wikipedia is super biased, they just hide it behind tons of rules and their “no POV” language that’s always in the passive voice. So we chose to wear it on our sleeves; our ideas are already fringe, presenting them in a palatable manner to try and look like “one of the good communists” would only distil marxism into meaninglessness, if you’re following me so far. We need to use the words and we need to make it clear what we believe in and what we’re talking about, otherwise what would separate us from the more lefty articles on Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia?
With that settled all the way back in 2020, we also realized quickly enough that we could not be a catch-all marxist encyclopedia. Forte had originally envisioned it that way IIRC, or at least it wasn’t really set in stone back in the beginning, but it turned out that it was an idea that didn’t work out in practice. Someone made an edit on the PRC page, then someone complained that it was too favourable to the PRC and started an argument to change it. Or someone wanted to make a page on some topic and someone else didn’t want that page to be made, etc. Eventually it just devolved into nonstop arguments in private, on the Telegram group, and nothing got done.
This is my interpretation of the events but getting anything out on prolewiki is better than endlessly discussing about potential stuff we could be doing and never doing it in the end, which is still a problem we have sometimes lol. If we wanted to have yet another struggle session between communists then we could do that anywhere else, we didn’t need prolewiki for it.
This first wave of editors soon lost their hype in the project and we kinda had to rebuild from scratch with a new userbase, with only very few original editors remaining. As it would happen, it was mostly MLs that remained, though we can probably partly attribute that to the fact that Forte and I are MLs. If we’d been Hoxhaists maybe you’d have hoxhapedia right now lol.
From there it took some time to formalize that we wanted to be a solely ML project, but ultimately it was the only way we could move forward and not get bogged down in endless struggle sessions that had played out already in the past.
Regarding the tone of the pages, if we abstract it from potential bias, it’s something that we’re working on. We’re not all necessarily great writers, and there’s a double challenge in that we have to start pages from scratch. Wikipedia, which is the big encyclopedia all others are compared to, has the benefit of having existed for over 20 years and having a large userbase that contributed to their pages, including academics in the early days (they’re leaving now because of the rigid structure to get their edits through).
Some pages could be phrased differently, and I have some in mind actually, but it’s always a fine line and difficult, in my experience. Difficult because you want to convey the idea accurately, but need to phrase it in a way you’ve never done before, which is an indirect, impersonal voice. It gets easier as the page gets fleshed out and some sort of narrative starts to show up, the point where you start to think “this is what we want this page to convey and this is how we want to convey it”. Some of our editors are also not native English speakers and might not know the subtleties needed to convey their writing in a more encyclopedic tone. Some of our pages are also from 2020, back when it was basically a free for all and with no guidelines, you could talk in any way you wanted as we were still trying to find our voice (and I was guilty of that too lol). There’s plans to go through these pages, but there’s so many at this point that I’m not sure we’ll ever get around to that.
But if you can send me a few pages that stuck out to you I can add them to our pile of pages to look at and maybe we’ll take a crack at them!
We realized pretty quickly that there was no such thing as no bias, all you could do was obfuscate it. Wikipedia is super biased, they just hide it behind tons of rules and their “no POV” language that’s always in the passive voice.
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 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.
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
Do you plan on making a Prolewiki mobile app?
In the long-term yes, but there’s no concrete plans yet. There’s some open source projects to make a mediawiki app but it still requires a good developer, it’s not as simple as plug and play unfortunately.
So I have done some pretty extensive research on my own into the issues surrounding Makhnovia and the Spanish Civil War (from the Republican side) out of personal interest and I have a head full of critical facts that get overlooked or misinterpreted by libs and radlibs alike.
The overwhelming majority of my sources come from either anarchists themselves or from libs who view anarchism with rose-tinted glasses while heaping blame upon the feet of the USSR (naturally.) But a close reading of these sources reveals some pretty damning facts about both subjects while the facts which exonerate the USSR are, of course, ignored, utterly minimised or slotted comfortably into that anti-communist unfalsifiable orthodoxy.
The only problem is that I have this constellation of facts and sources that I draw upon when discussing these matters with people who accuse the USSR of “betraying the revolution” but I haven’t ever really organised any of it into a coherent narrative that is logically arranged in such a way that would be suitable for a Wikipedia entry. And frankly that feels completely overwhelming to me because I have a good brain for details but I struggle with the overarching stuff. (I blame weak central coherence for that.)
I’m also uncertain about how to align what I would write with the editorial line of ProleWiki tbh.
Those are the barriers that I’m facing which have so far prevented me from contributing to ProleWiki although I feel as though I would be able to make valuable contributions.
So my question to you is - what do?
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.
I’m a bit curious as to how I’d start contributing to Prolewiki. I’d love to add some articles and add sections to existing ones where I can (especially in relation to the country I’m from).
The problem is that I have no experience from working with any forms of Wiki previously other than just reading it. Most of my experience comes from working with Wordpress back in the day and more traditional media, as in writing papers/articles in uni utilizing traditional paper based citing methods (Harvard and Chicago). So where would a total newbie even start to work towards writing full articles on ProleWiki (long term goal)? Most of the links I seem to find on the actual Wiki page seems to use language I’m not really familiar with, so something for those that know nothing would be great.
Using Mediawiki as an editor is actually pretty easy, we even have a user guide now as a reference for when you need to do something but don’t know how. Even citing references is easy, you click a button on the editor and fill in the fields and it formats everything for you. There’s a visual editor available since a few years ago and thankfully we don’t have to use the archaic source editor anymore.
The first step regardless is requesting an account, everything else stems from there. If your account is approved you’ll be able to learn editing at your pace and ask in the discord for help when you don’t know how to do something, though the user guide should also help with that.
Most of the links I seem to find on the actual Wiki page seems to use language I’m not really familiar with
What kind of language do you mean? Like a programming language?
Thanks so much. As far as language goes I suppose it’s just references to things that I don’t really know the meaning of yet. I’ll figure it out by reading up on each word as needed though, so I think I’ll figure it out, I just need to set aside some time to actually do it.
Anyhow… Thanks for having the Q&A on here, it does significantly lower the barrier to ask more basic things like this. I’ll look into things as far as applying for an account, though it does look like I’ll have to read up quite a bit on the theory first (I have adhd so most of the things I know so far has mostly been from listening from others and just my own ideas on things as reading can sometimes be a challenge). I’ll get there eventually though, so I see it more as a long term project than something I need to rush.
could you guys expand the AES page? I know this is hotbed topic since AES discussions usually ends up in stabbing contest but maybe start small by discussing and explaining how it came to be, what influenced it, and how it changed over time.
There’s actually not that much issues between the editors since we’re solely an ML project; at least not where it counts. But the way we work (that’s developed naturally even as we’ve tried to do something about it) is that our editors work on topics that interest them whenever they feel like it. We have so many pages and so many things to discuss that some pages get put on the backburner. I can put a notice in the discord to see if someone wants to tackle this page, but don’t expect too much to come out of it 😁
Alternatively, the best way to help improve ProleWiki is to request an account comrade!
Requesting an account? Sorry for my ignorance but how would I do that?
Everything is explained here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount. It’s a bit hard to find and we’re thinking about ways to improve that.
