I started out tentatively agreeing with OP because i myself have never liked having to answer questions in that way. It feels too much like a job interview where even if you are qualified but are bad at answering their questions you may not be picked while someone who just knows what kind of answers are expected and has learned how to fake it will get the job. But the replies given here by the mods have been very well reasoned and convincing. I think i am now on the side of at least continuing to employ these questions on Prolewiki where it is to be expected that people should be comfortable with writing and be at least somewhat competent at it.

For Lemmygrad, i don’t know, of course i would like it to continue to be free of trolls, bots and bad faith actors, but at the same time we shouldn’t make it too intimidating to join for people who are new to Marxism and don’t really have a great understanding yet. We want to welcome people in so they can learn. I think the most important thing is that they don’t come in with already solidified preconceptions. If they come with an open mind and are willing to learn then it’s ok for someone new to all this to answer “i don’t know” or “i’m not sure” when asked theory questions. On the other hand if they already come with the assumption “tankie = bad” and expect to preach their liberal nonsense then they can fuck off.

I rise in support of the vetting.

It works. It works so well there are sore anarchists and left-libs on hex bear who will let people know they were rejected from here.

Sure it won’t stop a CIA officer who’s familiar with Marxism and determined to get an account (though even they will probably have to take their time). But it stops fascists who aren’t going to spend hours researching Marxism to give convincing sounding and organic arguments and it stops liberals who likewise aren’t going to put in the effort.

I do think perhaps the admins could offer an abbreviated vetting for those with an account here to get on prole wiki and perhaps vice versa.

I don’t know about in other places, but when I joined here, I remember the questions giving me an opportunity to reflect on some things and put them more in concrete language. I’m not sure if it’s the same amount of questions now as it was then, but I don’t remember feeling deterred by it.

I could see it getting annoying if I was trying to join a lot of places in a short space of time that all did that, but for a one-time, rare thing, it didn’t really bother me.

I think having a lot of questions is good actually. Even for signing up for a bilibili account, you have to answer a lot of questions to demonstrate that you understand certain things about the site. Compared to the amount of time that you are going to spend on the site, it’s really not that much and it cuts down a lot on bad quality content. You can think of it as an alternative to the way that somethingawful makes you pay some money to join the site. It requires time instead of money, which is good because we’re trying to cultivate an international and working class culture here.

In regards to Lemmygrad we keep it very simple. I think the questions are the same ones you had to answer back when you made your account, with the addition of a copy-paste job meant to prevent AI (and it works great). There’s essentially 4 questions and you can keep it to one-two lines per answer because we have other systems on top of this one. On a forum like this trolls usually come out pretty quickly and get found out eventually because they keep posting. If they never post then they’re not really a troll and cause no bother.

In my experience trolls and other bad actors actually don’t bother trying to infiltrate the questions, they answer earnestly. Most of the rejections on lemmygrad are bots and people who wouldn’t fit in here, so we direct them to an instance that would be better for them.

I can also shed light on the ProleWiki vetting since I’m involved in fashioning it. We start from the premise that if you are going to be writing long articles on an encyclopedia, then you would be more likely to answer a longer vetting form. Experience tells us that our premise is not entirely wrong for two reasons:

1. We ask for feedback on the process at the end of the form and people tell us that they actually enjoy the questions, it forces them to think about things they might not have known about before. There’s a possibility that this is biased, i.e. the people that enjoy the process are the ones that go to the end of it in the first place, but -
2. We used to exist without a vetting process, you just had to tell us a bit about yourself freeform, and we didn’t get that many more account requests than we do currently. I think our average number of account requests has been pretty consistent since 2021.

This leads us to believe the barrier to entry is somewhere else and that the vetting form doesn’t factor in all that much.

The questions are designed to tell us a lot about the prospective editor, there’s a need to prevent bots which is a huge problem on Mediawiki, but we also need to make sure new editors are knowledgeable in all topics, i.e. that they are marxists. We want to be sure our editors won’t publish wrong or controversial information based on vibes. Once you get an account you can edit any page, so it’s totally possible that your area of expertise is in economics and you don’t know a lot about philosophy for example, but it works on the honor system and you promise to yourself you won’t edit philosophy pages. If we didn’t ask questions about philosophy we would never know that.

I agree with having people talk about themselves, but I don’t think one necessarily needs open-ended questions for that. What I find with that type of question is that people usually keep it short instead, which ends up providing very little information about them. When evaluating an account request on ProleWiki we normally only have their answers to go with and nothing else. If something is not made explicit in the answers, then we won’t know about that thing, so we need to encourage answers to be exhaustive.

The goal of this exhaustive process is not to gatekeep people but to make sure they have the knowledge required to become autonomous editors basically.

You were also wondering about the Principles. We have edited the principles to reflect editor commentary, e.g. wording or when we see the same point of confusion arise across different account requests. It allows us to see how people interpret our principles and we can also talk to them about that. There’s major disagreements that lead to a request being denied, and then there’s minor disagreements that arise from a reading misunderstanding (we can correct that by talking to the editor afterwards), or that as long as you agree not to reflect that disagreement in your edits is fine to live along with. If the question was simply “repeat that you agree to our principles and will not break them” we would be losing that self-crit component and might also be losing out on some requests because they feel a major disagreement that is actually only minor after we’re able to talk with them about it.

It’s a lengthy process but by our estimations it takes around 45 minutes on average to go through. This is a lot of time for some people and very little for others, but we are mindful of how long the process takes (along with how people discover it and how we can improve all of that package). The website doesn’t save it I think, which is something I’d like it to do, and I also think there’s too much text before the questions proper, but you should be able to copy the questions to Word, answer them at your pace there, and paste back into the PW form when you’re done. That way you don’t have to answer them all in one sitting.

edit: I wanted to add this but forgot. I like the idea of giving people one page to edit to see how they write etc. This is doable through the newish anon edits feature we rolled out some time back. But we might run into the same problem that this only tells us one facet of the prospective editor. But it’s something I can definitely see us explore eventually.

I want to say, I would have agreed with you that the questions do not stop bad actors, and that they are simple to get past, but I cannot even begin to tell you the amount of bad actors who cannot get through them and are stopped at the first hurdle. If we where finding that the questions were/are no longer serving that role we would change or remove them.

I can also tell you that we regularly have discussions on if we need to change or remove the questions, and if the questions are too burdensome for entry. I can say most of the questions are there because we have either had a fairly large issue with it in the past, or it has been a particularly good filtering tool

I’m not that involved in the formulating of the questions so I will leave that to the other admins to discuss but one thing I do want to address is the functionality of them.

You’d be surprised how many dumb ass applications get turned down before people are able to make an account and start shit on this site. Dozens of bad faith accounts have been filtered out this way and it’s mich easier to do then to remove comments, posts, etc that get potentially made afterwards.

I tend to agree. I’d love to hear a mod perspective – if these sorts of account filters seem to actually reduce the amount of bad actors we see – but I can also see a situation where the price of reducing that is too high in terms of legitimate users who decide it’s not worth the effort to make an account.

The best approach is probably:

1. Low barriers to creating accounts
2. A super quick trigger on maybe three-day temp bans, especially for new accounts
3. Fairly casual usage of permanent bans
4. A site culture where a ban is not some existential scandal and an excuse for a big slap fight, but rather a brush back pitch, where banned users are encouraged to learn from it and create new accounts

The last could be accomplished by adjusting whatever automated message accompanies bans, and by mods taking this line when they leave a comment after a ban/comment removal.