We know some comrades would love to edit the wiki but they do not feel "ready" to do so theoretically... Considering that, it's my duty to present the Lemmygrad community the library editors role in our wiki. Library editors are users who have access to editing our library, so they can help expand works available for everyone to read!

First of all, I understand those who feel they are "not ready" to create an account and edit. But you're not really required to be extensively well read on everything so you can contribute. Most of what I've learned about theory, history and politics was a consequence of my editing on ProleWiki, as I learned in the process of researching stuff to put on the wiki.

Second, if you feel like you're not currently able to research and edit stuff, it's understandable, since it takes work to do that. But by contributing to the library, you're helping others have easier access to important works.

Have you ever read anything you felt like everyone should read it? And when you search for that book, you realize it's very hard to find? Your contributions could help others have access to that very important information in a very accessible form. You'll be doing your part in elevating the consciousness of the people from the comfort of your home

So, go ahead and request an account already! Fill in the questions based on what you know, and if you're interested specifically in a library account, tell us so in your request form. This means we'll take it easy on your answers. Those who wish to request a full fledged account, just answer the questions to your best ability, but we're usually more rigorous with the answers.

We'll give everyone from Lemmygrad feedback about their answers, so you can see this as an opportunity to test your knowledge too 🤓

We are declaring war on sourceless edits and vow to purge all of them!

This is great news for you the reader, as from now on we are way more stringent on sourcing.

To that end, we have brought back patrolling -- a MediaWiki function that creates a queue of all edits where special users have to resolve the edit, kinda like resolving a mod queue item. Users who have shown interest in patrolling will be able to see this queue and resolve it.

From now on, this group will REVERT sourceless edits and claims, not to punish editors, but to remove unsourced claims from public view until they can be sourced.

Nobody will be spared: admins and patrollers have to have their edits patrolled as well by someone else. If we don't source, they can revert.

I'm very excited to announce this change that will improve our sourcing and authority as a trustworthy encyclopedia. We have allowed sourceless edits for too long, and this ends starting tomorrow.

"Common sense" claims will be allowed without sources so as not to drown a page in sources. These include, for example, a person's name or date of birth. Broad claims to introduce a topic, such as "The revolution brought many changes to the country" are also allowed without sources as it's a broad, vague claim that is obviously true. But if an edit said "the revolution brought many changes to social classes in the country", they would have to source that.

We expect our sourcing policy will evolve with experience as we try this new plan.

Background info (you don't have to read that)

Earlier today, we had to ban a long-time editor after they admitted on Reddit that they essentially used the wiki to promote their own project, which is fine and we discussed this with them. But they admitted they made joking articles just to mess with us. We banned them for this and removed all their edits. This included an entire article they wrote without sources. Essentially, they said we were idiots for believing they were being good faith.

This person had been with us for over a year and a half, and while they were an anti-revisionist, they had never given us trouble. We did have suspicions once, but nothing came of it after investigation. It was a shock to the editorship that they would betray

This event prompted us to change our sourcing policy. It already needed patrols, and so we finally went ahead with the plan in record time: less than 6 hours from start to finish, from deciding on the new policy (what it will do, what it will look like, etc) to finding volunteers and setting up the permissions. They are now, at this moment, making their way through the recent changes.

We are also discussing our policy regarding non-MLs on ProleWiki from now on. Every time we've let a non-ML on, they've abused our generosity and turned out to be opportunists. We let that user promote their group because we believe their group has an interesting project, and we like to give back to editors by letting them self-promote as ProleWiki is all volunteer work. We prefer to build bridges than burn them.

It's not like we let in non-MLs, but we might have looked at their account request seriously if they said they weren't MLs. With that I really just want to instantly reject them if they say anything other than ML lol. It's not policy yet though, we're discussing it.

Anyway, evidently some people don't feel like building things together and somehow it's never the MLs that are being difficult. It's always non-MLs that want to appropriate PW for themselves.

It's good in a way though, it shows we're punching above our weight and people are taking us seriously. We're gonna keep being ML as per our principles and we're gonna let revisionists and opportunists be scared of a growing power that calls them out and doesn't bow to them.

Ones to give comrades quick rundowns of Eastern Orthodoxy or Camus if they are not in the know. I'm not knowledgeable enough to write them, but it would be cool. You could include various marxist takes on them and stuff.

Ur cert is for some sorta cloudflare site :p

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2873960

Lemmygrad and ProleWiki are the only communities I've found where I feel safe to be myself and more importantly, safe to learn. I always ask questions and want to learn so much. When I am here, those questions are not found by others as annoying or bothersome or suspicious, but rather as genuine questions from someone trying to learn.

We've been wanting to make this for a while now and I finally got around to sketching something out for ProleWiki portals. You can check it out right now by clicking on the post title.

If you know Wikipedia portals, it's like those but better. A sort of mini-site within the website or a centralized, one-stop repository of everything to do around this topic (in this case marxism which we felt was the most important topic to cover).

It also helps bridge some of the "disorganized" nature of wikis where the information is contained in several different pages that you have to individually read to get a full idea.

It's still WIP but the structure is there, it's the content that's gonna need some more work etc. Like right now it only links to other pages but we could imagine writing it like a course on marxism if we wanted to.

The consensus I see both inside and outside PW is that the library is pretty cool but a bit too empty still.

To help grow it, I've been thinking about letting in library editors. You could create a library editing account, which would be much easier to get than a "full" editor account.

This account would only have access to the library however, so as to add, edit and format books. With those permissions you could even translate books (chatGPT works great for this, much better than you'd expect), make reading lists, and probably do other stuff I haven't thought of yet. You would have access to all pages preceded by "Library:" essentially.

This would allow people who do not qualify for a full account or that we refuse for whatever reason to still participate in some capacity. Getting a library account would be much, much easier; there would be barely any questions (maybe 3-5).

For reference, this is the questions to get a full account: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount. There's even gonna be more questions soon, and we refuse a lot of requests, mostly from baby marxists and non-MLs.

It could also get you a foot in the door to later become a full editor more easily, doing the full vetting whenever you like after getting your library account and getting to know our processes, how we work, and just interacting with the community.

Now come the questions for this survey:

• Would you be interested in becoming a library editor over a full editor? Or would you just prefer to go through the "full" vetting process? Detail as much as you want here.
• If yes, how many hours a week do you think you could involve on the library? It's not a quota, it's just to get an idea of if this is worth pursuing.
• Is it clear to you what a library account is, and how it differs from the full account?

For now, we're just gauging interest in this. There's no process yet to add library editors, but if we go ahead with this we'll contact the interested comrades and invite them to make a library account.

(This is open to both Lemmygrad and Hexbear btw)

Thanks for reading and answering, as always your feedback is very much appreciated.

Imagine still sending copium 1 year later to a project you voluntarily left.

Anyway we can celebrate his upcoming ban anniversary on October 21st! (Oh and because I expect people will ask, this has nothing to do with the big thing we're preparing lol)

Couldn't tell you what he wrote cause I read like one sentence before denying it, not reading all that crap he wrote.

"Literally just Conservapedia with red paint" -A Redditor

https://take.supersurvey.com/poll4961517xf7694681-152

I know we don't have to convince our strongest soldiers in Lemmygrad but I sincerely can't overhype how important this is going to be 💪

Hint: 📖

What do you think it is? Wrong answers only.

Hello, I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself and seek input from our community regarding a new feature we're considering implementing in the Prolewiki Library.

I’m the new Library Maintainer for Prolewiki. My responsibilities are to fix any incomplete library works, make the library easy to navigate, collect feedback and analyze how you all use it to make it better. Essentially, I'm here to ensure that the library functions smoothly and is user-friendly.

Lately at Prolewiki we have been exploring the idea of adding notes and introductions to the books, articles and other works in the library in the form of footnotes and an introduction paragraph. This serves a couple of purposes: firstly, it allows us to bring awareness to mistakes in the text, and secondly, it provides contextual information to deepen comprehension.

This is ONLY about adding notes and introductions, we would NOT be removing or changing anything from works we upload like the MIA Does! With that in mind we have some questions we would like to ask to get feedback from you about this feature.

QUESTIONS

1. Do you believe that having footnotes/introductions for corrections and context would enhance the overall quality of content in our library and make it more trustworthy?

2. Would you consider using Prolewiki more often for the same books and articles that you can also find on other websites if we provided helpful notes or introductions?

3. Do you think they should be used solely for corrections and context, or should they also allow for opinions and interpretations?

4. How concerned are you about potential abuse or misuse such as biased commentary or incorrect information? Would this possibility make you less likely to use our library?

5. Are there any specific examples of books, articles, or works in the library that you believe would greatly benefit from this feature at this time? Please provide some examples.

6. How do you think we could name the Prolewiki introduction paragraph to make it clear this is a ProleWiki addition?

7. What additional suggestions or concerns do you have about the implementation of this feature in our library?

Thank you for your feedback comrades!!!

And what a year has 2023 been. But we'll leave all that for the end of year review ;)

Anyway, I want to thank all our editors, and our readers of course, who support us on the daily by using and promoting ProleWiki around them, showing that our model works.

See you next year! (Joking there will be plenty more things happening throughout the rest of 2023 and 2024)

Once you realize "hey I can actually do this" everything just falls into place.

Over the past few days, I've added icons to the sidebar. These icons take you to the library and essays page. If you have ideas for more icons it's definitely possible to add them.

I've also finally added a hyperlink button to headings:

which lets you go to the heading and copy the URL from your browser straight from the reader view. Before that you had to go through the table of contents and personally I was always fighting with it. I still don't get why the skin doesn't do this by default.

This hyperlink thing gave me a few issues however, it only works for wiki pages (not essays or library works for example), and I had to disable it on level 1 headings for now as when you clicked on the button, it also collapsed the heading (this is normal behaviour when you otherwise click on the heading).

These additions "unfortunately" need javascript to be enabled, otherwise you won't see them.

Next up I want to find a way to create a table of content template and "previous and next chapter" additions so that we can easily divide long books into subpages (one for each chapter). Gonna need some thought put into it first.

At least much awaited to me lol.

Want to try it out? Open prolewiki while logged out and click the button to edit a page! See for yourself what it does 😉

We've had a pervasive issue where you need to request an account to start making edits but the button is a bit hidden,t especially on the new Citizen skin. But it's not super clear either way that one needs an account to be able to edit.

I've been throwing around the idea for at least a year of bringing up the edit button you see when you're logged in but for non-logged in users. The usecase I'm envisioning is that you go on prolewiki, you read a bit, then you want to edit something, but there's no button anywhere like you'd expect on Wikipedia for example. I imagine this is the usual user journey, and so it's not immediately clear you can and need to request an account.

So all this little button does (which was a chore to get working and requires JS but the more I fail at mediawiki the more I learn) is look like the normal edit button but it takes you to the account request page. It might be a bit jarring to be expecting a visual editor to open and get the huge request account page with all the questions instead but this is still a pilot test and we'll see if it helps improve account request rates!

I have to say this wouldn't have been possible without chatgpt which helps me get started on those projects. It takes a lot of trial and error and especially human guidance to get something working (and you have to know what you want and how you want it otherwise it's gonna tell you to reconfigure server files out of nowhere), but it's really helpful to get the ball rolling on how to deploy this kind of solution. Same for the library and essays, I couldn't have built them without some chatgpt help. It's not bad at coding simple stuff either, especially lua for some reason. Well, it's not really a surprise, the AI knows mediawiki more than me at this stage lol.

It's technically just a spiced up frontend for our essays, but it looks exactly like a blog and so this marks the opening of our very own blogging space!

This was all custom-built by me over the course of the weekend + months of research until we realized, yep, we have to make this ourselves 😵‍💫

Anyway go check out the "press release" we wrote for it and then check out the new space.

I should work on it more before showing it off, but I can't wait any longer lol.

What do you think of it so far?

This is still a prototype mind you and I'm still working on the aesthetics, but what we have so far is that every essay will automatically be transcluded on this page, ordered from newest to oldest.

edit: there's now pictures to illustrate the essays

My big question I think is: is this more conducive to reading and getting clicks than the legacy page? (https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Essays).

Secondly, does this look pretty self-explanatory to you? There are only two essays in it mind you because it's still a prototype, but we have more than 20-30 to put on this page eventually.

What more would you see to spice this page up? And maybe drive the blog style home a little bit more.

The term "cabal" is only used by reactionary anti-Semites. Please fix!

Our previous record was 1294 on March 1st.

We broke it yesterday on September 7 by a whopping 480 more visits, or ~140%.

I sincerely thank whoever linked us to their community for this. I think in this case it was visits from communists as the visits log showed that they read a ton of pages, mostly having to do with political figures in the US but not only.

This comes after we almost had set a new record only days earlier on the 5th when, that time, a possible liberal linked us somewhere as we had lots of people looking at our page on the Holodomor (which we differentiate from the soviet famine of 1931-33 in a different page).

It doesn't matter where the visits come from. If they're haters or we're preaching to the choir. What matters is that websites are meant to be seen, and if people visit them, then that's half the work already done. It's even better when we get hateposted somewhere because then we reach out of our usual niche. It only takes you agreeing with one thing on prolewiki to come back for a second visit.

Great things are happening and it's only upwards from here on out.

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!

When confirming an email, the following warning can be seen on the confirmation screen:

Deprecated: Use of User::getGroupsWithPermission was deprecated in MediaWiki 1.34. [Called from ConfirmAccount::getAdminsToNotify in /var/www/prole/extensions/ConfirmAccount/includes/backend/ConfirmAccount.class.php at line 329] in /var/www/prole/includes/debug/MWDebug.php on line 382