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

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.

Is it by adding "Library:" into the title of a new article? Or is there some other specific way of categorizing it to make it appear in the library?

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.