If you didn’t hear you can now edit ProleWiki without requiring an account, but you can’t create pages that way.
In this thread you can ask us to create pages for you and then with the anon edit feature, edit them yourself.
To avoid your edits being rejected, please note that:
- Your IP will be published if you edit anonymously, use a VPN or similar if you don’t want that.
- Read the editing guidelines and
- Read our Principles.
- We also require every claim to be sourced in some way. We have citation templates that you should use and fill out as much as possible.
As for requesting a page, please provide the title you want for it spelled exactly how you want it as the wiki is case-sensitive. I’ll probably do a look-over first anyway to see if we already have a page for it.
I would like to edit the Communist Party USA page since I’m already a member.
I find myself in a bind trying to give you an answer, which is why it’s taken so long to get back to you. Of course I could simply ignore your request and move on, but I don’t think that would solve or progress anything.
The first difficulty is I don’t know where to start with my answer. But maybe first, let me answer some concerns you’ve brought up in the past. I’ve seen comments from you here and there before that you weren’t sure if you were allowed to edit the CPUSA page, as in if your account would be banned for it or your edits reverted.
I’m not sure where those concerns come from, as your account hasn’t had any ban or other restrictions placed on it and we’ve never banned anyone for editing a page. This is something I want to point out before I give a proper answer to the comment above; it’s a bit difficult to move forward with someone when they go around claiming things that won’t happen but giving the impression that they will happen. This is something that, in my opinion, should have been brought up to the admin- or editorship directly to receive a clear answer instead of letting hypotheses and what-ifs fester for weeks and months.
This is the bind I find myself in and why it took me so long to reply and I think I can only give you a proper admin-to-editor reply if I acknowledge and bring up this point. On the one hand, as an admin [of ProleWiki] I can’t easily take sides against editors and I try to defend and support all our editors as much as possible so they get their due process. On the other, I think you’ll agree that your fondness for CPUSA is well-known and that our page on CPUSA is not the most complimentary.
On paper, there’s nothing preventing you from editing any pages as you have an account on ProleWiki. We don’t prevent anyone from editing any page and committing their edit. In practice though, this is just my own individual answer. The reality of it will depend on what the editorship thinks about an edit – any edit. We often come back to editing even longer pages, if only to clarify the wording, or sometimes even change entire paragraphs to give a different meaning. We’re having huge conversations on our naming conventions currently for example, and especially relating to “Israel”.
So the best answer I can give you is as a facilitator, which is what the administration of ProleWiki is. I know who has contributed to the CPUSA page the most and I know where they want to take it, so I can give you advice and suggestions. Beyond that, I can give you a clear list of your permissions on ProleWiki (same as any other editor currently) to help you form a decision. But this is only my personal suggestions, and I can’t predict how the editorship reacts to an edit with 100% certainty. This response belongs to them, and our task as admins is not necessarily to prevent a response from happening. Likewise, my suggestions are not orders or conditions; your decision to edit the page (or not) belongs to you, I can only help inform you so you can make a decision with all the facts in your hand.
What I would suggest is to first use the talk pages to talk about what you want to add to the article, running it by the editorship first. I would also advise against removing anything on the page but rather only adding content to it. Lastly, please note that we require all claims to be sourced since early 2024 when committing an edit, otherwise it might be reverted.
And I think that’s my complete answer to remove as much doubt and opaqueness as possible. I could have simply said “you’re free to edit the page”, but I don’t think it would have achieved any progress or mutual understanding.
Very well. You technically didn’t have to make your reply this lengthy, but okay, I like the answer.
I don’t want to make the page laudatory of CPUSA.
But there are holes missing and it uses the, for example, Red Clarion blog as a source (a blog that acts like our org is fucking mysterious when “Communist Party studies” or “American communist” studies in academia are very common and have been since Hammer and Hoe was released in the early 80s). But my antipathy to that blog aside, I’m not going to make it uncritical.
And I want to fill in the holes and gaps.
I don’t always agree with Nat’l, but I’m deeply interested in recovering CPUSA history and Socialist Party history.
Not to mention the labor movement could use some work in the entries; I could easily make a single page for each AFL-CIO federation (well, a lot of them).
Also, FRSO is scanty at this point; why not give it its due?
The reason why I was intent on starting my own Wiki, probably publishing it on Obsidian with some friends, was that I felt that, judging by previous comments made about CPUSA by Forte, that the state of the current entry on CPUSA was meant to be unflattering and unrepresentative of the part, or representing a viewpoint that views the post-1956 history of the party as “revisionist” or “reformist” or whatever, when the era of Gus Hall and Angela Davis is a lot more complicated (but also well-documented).
As someone that may be out of CPUSA, not due to any disagreements with the party program per se (though I did have disagreements with members, Nat’l, and certain collectives), I could easily fill in those gaps.
I promise that I won’t make it “pro-CPUSA” but I don’t want it to be “anti-CPUSA” either. Hell, I literally joined the CPUSA to find out what the previous generation of communists during the Cold War era thought and that history is being lost to us. The PSL and FRSO by extension are spawned off of the organization. Each organization also owes something to the leaders of CPUSA when it started, whether it be PSL’s previous formation in the 1960s (vis a vis people like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or William Z. Foster) or perhaps they may look more kindly on the Gus Hall/Henry Winston era (before Sam Webb) as in PCUSA’s case. And FRSO has more or less the same view.
My friend already has a wiki, one of them anyway, and I wanted to promote that, but if ProleWiki is willing to be flexible with how it portrays my political party or other orgs, then I won’t try to go against it for the time being. It’s best we have one Wiki anyway for communists.
Also, yeah, fuck “Israel.” I don’t mind using the quotations.
