We're preparing a bigger survey that will see wider distribution, but to help me calibrate it and know what I want to ask, I want to run some preliminary questions here.

Your answers will help us improve the wiki in the short-term, so thanks for participating! You can simply comment below or send me a DM if you want to remain somewhat anonymous.

Section 1

• Do you have an account on ProleWiki?
• If not, why?
• Were you aware that having an account on ProleWiki allows you to edit pages and participate in the editor community?

Section 2

• How often do you visit ProleWiki in a week or month?
• What keeps you coming back to ProleWiki?
• What impact has ProleWiki had on you? Either positive or negative (please detail)

Section 3

• Where do you feel ProleWiki is lacking?
• Please take a page you remember that you didn't entirely like and provide your criticism of it, not only on the content but on the phrasing as well. Please don't choose a stub (we know they're too short 🙏)
• How would you rate the language and tone used on ProleWiki from 1 to 10? With 1 being casual (as if between friends), and 10 being academic (as if presenting a paper to an auditorium).
• Do you perceive ProleWiki to be a credible encyclopedia?

Bonus question: how would you like to see ProleWiki evolve?

Be as honest as you can, I won't take it personally.

Hexbearers can answer too now that we're federated btw, but this remains a small-scale internal survey until the real big one gets published.

my suggestion

https://prolewiki.redbubble.com

Our redbubble account was finally approved, which means we are now selling stickers, pins, magnets, even coasters lol. Tote bags, t-shirts... I mean, why stop at just stickers?

But that's not all, we teamed up with artist Tamaryn (https://www.artstation.com/tamaryn) who graciously offered some of her own art for our store, to help fundraise. I think her art looks dope.

We ended up settling for Redbubble due to two considerations: price and ease of access. They ship worldwide, and they are one of the cheapest POD (print on demand) service for the consumer. At this time we don't have the capabilities of offering all this stuff ourselves.

Of course, we encourage you to make your own stickers and pins if that's cheaper for you. It's shipping they get you on. We barely make any money on any sale, our main fundraising avenues are still direct donations, the store is just a way to get some merch (eyeing some of that stuff myself personally).

Anyway, we're pretty stoked about this new store and we're hoping the art can help make sales on the broader site to fund the revolution with liberal money lol

You can see them work on my sandbox page: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Comrade:CriticalResist/sandbox#Communists

The plan is we'll use the big cards for like our main authors or topics, and then the mini cards for "smaller" authors.

On mobile the difference is sizeable, you can fit 7 mini cards in what was 2 big cards.

Do you want to know what the debugging was for? They didn't align properly. Not how I wanted them. Somehow that took 2 days to figure out, but they look all neat now :D

btw if you're a communist dev you can request an account on prolewiki and help us with these projects or anything else you have ideas for, we love people with initiative, you don't necessarily have to be writing!

Or really not just devs, anyone that has ideas to help ProleWiki can help make them come true.

I'm guessing you can't vote on mastodon if you don't have an account, so you can vote here too.

We need to figure out:

• what they're going to look like
• who to sell with (redbubble, spreadshirt, maybe even aliexpress, etc)
• pricing, though it will probably be affordable. We plan to give them out to our editors on request, so you buying a sticker will fund them to our editors. Really by buying stickers from us you help support the website.

but they could be shipped out to you by the end of the week...

or the next, it's a bit hopeful lol

Edit 1: Wisconcom finally found the file, and has DM'd me on Discord! He joined the archive server we set up of his "Committee" and found my name from there. But he failed to realise one thing -- it was all a facade!

1. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/803508721383899146/1129346283325358110/Screenshot_20230714_113703_com.discord_edit_708705141816628.jpg

2. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/803508721383899146/1129346283614777364/Screenshot_20230714_113716_edit_708720428790008.jpg

Since November* 2022, ProleWiki has been the victim of a very dedicated stalker and harasser.

ProleWiki has been maintaining this document since February of 2023, when Wisconcom was ramping up his attacks and harassment against us.

When he left us alone briefly in May-June 2023, we agreed we would not publish it so as not to ruin his reputation. It was always an equivalent exchange: if you stop bothering us, we'll leave you alone.

He didn't though, he came back in July as many of you are aware, and so we make good on our promise. That is one thing Wisconcom -- and all harassers that would come our way -- must realise about us.

Be prepared for a long read, but it's worth it.

I am only the humble messenger of this document.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Library

Go check it out and give us your feedback!

BY THE WAY, you can help upload books to the library! We can transfer books 1:1 from Google Docs or LibreOffice to MediaWiki. That means you can get books we don't have from another source, work them in Google Docs, send me the link (or better yet join our discord so other editors can pitch in), and I can upload them to our library. Not going to open random files though, it has to be google docs lol thanks

Took a lot of trial and error but with some help with chatgpt, I was able to finally render the mockup.

Try it now before we push it live and give us your feedback!

with the way twitter is going, I don't give it much longer to live so we're diversifying our social media presence just in case.

Original author Ivan Katchanovski has given explicit permission to everyone in the world to rehost and republish his paper.

We immortalised it on ProleWiki because it's a very important paper even though some of the content is a bit both sidesy. Actually we were looking at possibly writing a preface to help new comrades parse this paper, but I feel that would make it our own reedition, which is a very different thing from republishing.

what are the requirements for a password

He requested an account on the Spanish instance of prolewiki, waited 2 months to get it looked at and approved, and then promptly started wrecking like 10 pages of ProleWiki. I mean only 10 pages, no more lol.

He left this gem in his old user page:

https://en.prolewiki.org/index.php?title=Comrade:Wisconcom&oldid=50738

However, I soon cognizant of the revisionist

lmao

anyway he got his edits reverted instantly by other editors and then banned a few moments later.

Very funny guy, helped brought the community closer.

I've been perusing the wiki looking for some sources, and I think I may even want to contribute to it in a month or so. But I noticed a lot of the book references include libgen links. While I think it's a great convenience, couldn't having it be so prominent eventually get the project in legal trouble?

It's like this. We made a thread on Otto Warmbier for Twitter that got 100k views, which was already huge for us and led to some direct traffic.

Then, we made a thread on Yeonmi Park just a few days later that reached a whopping 450k people, and that led to our second best day on record in terms of visits (first day was 1.1k visits on march 1st for some reason).

After that, we already saw increased traffic by about 150%.

Shortly after, some libs found our pages and tweeted about them. I think it went from tankiejerk (the subreddit) to some EU weirdo we ratioed lol who didn't like that we were truthful about the Dems and the Labour party. That led to some increased traffic too.

Then SDL (yes, that SDL) tweeted about us too and was literally the only person who couldn't tell the difference between Conservapedia's page on the UA-RU war and ours lol. That led, I think also with an r/tankiejerk thread, to our new second best day on record, almost reaching 1st place but falling just short.

Since then, along with a consistent posting schedule and call to actions on Twitter to redirect traffic to the website, we've seemingly durably doubled our daily traffic.

I estimate that since we went viral, we increased readership durably by 10% (total visitors - visitors that came from social media, averaged out over a week, then comparing growth between pre-viral and post-viral period)

And the best part is it doesn't matter if they're libs looking at ProleWiki for outrage farming! They're still looking. They're still visiting. Only 2% of visitors bounce from the website, meaning they leave without clicking on any other page.

Anyway comrades, ProleWiki is 100% volunteer work and user funded. If you want, you can either request an account or make a donation! We're actually going to make our first purchase soon, you'll be updated soon on that milestone 😉

Last week, we made a Twitter thread on the Otto Warmbier story that reached 125k people.

A few days later, we made a thread on Yeonmi Park that reached 450k people on Twitter.

Since then, any tweet we send out has been an instant hit, garnering 10000 views at the very least.

The Yeonmi Park thread was such a hit that Natalie Everhart and Hakim messaged us lol (okay technically we messaged Natalie first for help on a follow-up thread)

I've been posting nonstop since then to try and ride that wave as much as possible, spacing the tweets out by a day or two each so that they don't cannibalise each other.

This is after we'd been stuck in the void for a few months, desperately posting to go from 2390 to 2400 followers, our tweets getting a measly 300 views no matter on the quality.

With just two viral tweets, we gained 1400 followers, or more than 50%.

DPRK posting especially got them hooked, a simple picture of a bus stop in Pyongyang got 50k views.

It's also been great for redirecting traffic to PW, but not so much to get new editors yet.

I have to admit it's getting difficult to find stuff to tweet about and it takes a while to prepare those threads so if anyone of our Lemmygradians has ideas and would like to write a thread for us, I think that could be worked out. You get at least 10000 views guaranteed (it's addictive) and we can link to your handle!

Before:

After:

I must have legit forgot CSS existed because the eyesore that was the before format stuck out at me for months before I decided to add the three CSS lines to fix it.

Also if you haven't read the thread: https://twitter.com/prolewiki/status/1665374518909517827 this thing got us 200 new followers on Twitter.

This thing is only about 50-60% complete. Thankfully ProleWiki is not that difficult to edit compared to say, Wikipedia.

This month, as an admin of ProleWiki I've been working on "professionalising" the encyclopedia. It's become much more active in May, and we realised we needed something to help new editors find their way around. The goal is that they become autonomous as soon as possible and we don't need to oversee them. This frees up time in the administration for other things. Also helps reduce easily answered questions new editors have about formatting and other formalities.

Other changes included an editor onboarding page, as well as a clarification page (all linked in the tutorial if you start following the links so I won't link them in this post).

Did you know ProleWiki has a library?

On it, we self-host dozens (maybe even 100) of books, texts, transcripts, documents and other things of interest to communists.

You can visit it here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Library

Now, if you're me, you might be thinking it's kind of a mess right now. Truth is, we quickly added this library in 2020 and it just kept growing since then. We're now in a situation where the model we use (pile everything up on top of each other) is quickly becoming saturated.

I have some ideas to fix the library, but for that I need some feedback. And possibly some help, if this is something you're interested in. I could use some UI/UX specialists, and maybe a PHP/mediawiki programmer to implement our new library lol

But first things first, I've prepared a short survey to help us collect some feedback and prepare for the next step. You can take the survey here:

https://questionpro.com/t/AX7J7ZySkD

It's completely anonymous!

Thanks to all donators, mostly from Patreon and Liberapay, we managed to upgrade the server so we have more space to store the content produced in the wiki.

We have stored every fund we have in a Brazilian bank, away from the dollar, and because it's easier to manage given the current staff of administrators. Upgrading the server cost us in total R$1243.40 (~US$247.39). This includes taxes in international transactions (R$13.91 Brazilian international exchange fee + R$57.09 exploited by PayPal) and a US$49.50 service we requested so the disk could be extended. The VPS server itself cost us US$183.5 for a whole year.

After paying for the host, we now have available R$3342.46 (~US$664.48) in funds. There is currently no plan for this money, and we are just storing it so we can pay for hosting for more years. We reserved a part of this money (R$2500.00) in savings which have earned us an extra R$33.17 passively, which is a minimal, but safe investment, and still better than just letting the money alone.

Any suggestion on what to do with this money is welcome. Thank you all for making ProleWiki sustain itself for one more year!

Enjoy this account request we just received.

And yes it's Wisconcom, this dweeb doesn't even know how to use a VPN.

truly a christmas gift