Hello, comrades, I wish you all well.

The purpose of this community is to make communication easier between those who contribute with labor to the ProleWiki project and those who do not, but enjoy making part of the community. The labor involved means editing and translating articles, administration, web development, database management, etc. For the purpose of this text, I will distinguish between passive and active comrades, active being those who contribute with labor, passive being those who do not.

The only way for a human organization to flourish is for it to become dynamic and especially attentive to the current necessities according to our analysis of reality. One thing that may orient us in this aspect is the Marxist materialist method. The development of our articles may help those who haven’t been able to study enough to understand this knowledge, and also the demands for knowledge must orient the development of our articles.

Promoting dialectical exchange between comrades is efficient in every aspect, provided this exchange is attentive to our real necessities.

So, considering the ease of reading, I will organize some ideas in topics.

Understanding needs

We have a lack of labour input. For instance, for the last 5 days, comrade @camarada@lemmygrad.ml and I have been preparing for database and over all website look and feel.

While this comrade is a competent web designer, and I a slow but diligent learner, just the two of us couldn’t do much. We, however, worked better together, not as individuals. So we understand that organization is more efficient, but we need first understand our needs before we look for a way to organize its solution.

I’ll list the current demands of ProleWiki:

  • We need help writing articles, of course. While I have started writing an article for Marxism-Leninism, I suggest we promote a research on what are the comrades’ current demands, our general lack of knowledge. Like, what do they need help understanding, what articles they would like to read, etc. This could be done in the comments of this post.

This may help active comrades focus on articles relevant to the passive comrades. Feel free to suggest what articles you would like to read, then all active comrades pay attention to articles which have the largest demand, and when you have the time, why not contribute with a few words on our articles? :winking face:

  • I have created a database for the French language and it is fully operational. However, our front page does not currently show the French language, and we’ll need comrades who play with PHP to fix it. We also need comrades who can figure out how to use MediaWiki’s API to fix the article counter, too, which is currently misleading since a placeholder number was used.

It’s not very urgent for this issue to be solved, but it’d be nice to have it working once we have a considerable amount of articles.

  • We need pages about our project, especially About ProleWiki and How to contribute pages. Don’t worry, no need to consult active comrades before writing about our project. If we find anything wrong, we’ll fix it. For the “How to Contribute”, you can use excerpts of this post as reference.

Again, not very urgent, but it’d be nice to have that done.

  • Once we understand what articles need to be done, we need people to help us organize our effort. These people can talk directly to people they know who can contribute to articles. These agitators are an essential work, because they will be adding other comrades to share their knowledge with us.

Let’s not expect too much, nor too less

This is part of a project, a project for the international dialectical exchange between comrades. Lemmygrad was one powerful advance the international workers have accomplished, and ProleWiki can also be one more step forward.

This depends entirely on us. I am a Brazillian wage-slave, comrades, and I organize locally, so I understand we may have a lot of responsibilities to take care of, and we frequently can only contribute in a limited way. For instance, I have been paying the website hosting out of my shitty wage, but it’s enough to handle it. If things get tough, I’ll let everyone know too, don’t worry.

And here comes the importance of having more comrades available: we have more labor input, and we can contribute to a higher standard of quality in our work.

Also, please be patient. The Soviet Union wasn’t built in a day. It will take some time for us to organize efficiently. By sharing our knowledge, we are contributing to the immediate education of future comrades, and those will continue our project as long as they can. We need to first start somewhere.

Reporting

As you can see in the title, this is first in a series of reports which will happen periodically. I’ll give the next report next month, so we can track our progress as we develop our project.

TL;DR

Please comment what articles you would want to read in a Marxist-Leninist encyclopedia. That’s it, really.

  • Makan ☭ CPUSA
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    63 years ago

    I’m currently working on my China Wiki project and even then I’ve been distracted a lot, but I’ll give you some pointers on what I’d like to read. Thanks!

    • Camarada ForteOPMA
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      73 years ago

      That’s great, comrade! Ask the comrades at China Wiki if they’re okay exchanging articles with us at ProleWiki, I’d be glad to translate your work. We can even promote each other on our websites.

  • @chad1234
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    43 years ago

    you could copy the old Megathreads from reddit and other places

    • Camarada ForteOPMA
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      53 years ago

      Nice. Don’t forget you can do it too, comrade!