ProleWiki talk:Editorial guidelines

Thoughts on formalizing a compendium for commonly used sections within articles? Ordered by topics such as people, states, etc, we could officially enshrine names for sections such as background, bibliography, history, views etc

added in the ProleWiki:User guide

In order to better adjust new comrades to common practices within our community, I suggest that we create informational essays which explain aspects about editing pages and such.

I myself have already created one such example, namely, Prolewiki:Retirement. I believe that, furthermore, we should emulate the model of other internet-based encyclopedias, such as wikipedia is this regard.

I would appreciate something like that. Particularly I would like to learn how things like categorizing things to be put in the library are done, and about creating the boxes that contain things like country names, flags, populations etc. In terms of tone and style I have just been trying to use an academic style to the best of my ability and also trying to match the tone and style of other articles.

added for *last* sections of a page

I think it would pay to start thinking about the order of headings on pages. For example on pages relating to historical or current figures, we usually start with a linear biography. For pages on countries, we also usually start with their history as the first heading.

One thing we can figure out right now I think is the end-of-page sections: further reading, references, etc. My proposed order would be :

1. See also (linking to other pages) 2. Further reading (linking to books or articles) 3. External links (links to other websites with information) 4. References (reference list)

I made this list ordered by importance to the article. First we have prolewiki pages, then we have books for people that want to read more, then we have the external link template with the great soviet encyclopedia, ecured, etc. and finally the references.

This is pretty much lifted from Wikipedia and we don't have to follow them 100%. But like I say often, wikipedia is war-mongering drivel but they have had to ask themselves these questions too and find answers.

Agree with all propositions on the end page sections. About the start page sections, it depends on the subject being discussed, of course. We don't have many extensive biographies, but it's possible to establish a standard for countries

added

I think bluelinking once in the infobox and then bluelinking another time in the paragraph is a good idea, some people might not read the infobox and skip over it while reading, i often notice this with myself, thoughts on this?

I agree with that and had thought about it too. So the editorial rule would be something like "I. Bluelinking: Blue links made to other articles should be made only when they are first introduced in the body of the article, as well as in the infobox" (italics my added words to the existing rule)

Yeah this looks good, i agree with this

I remember we had this discussion in the earlier days of the wiki on how to format dates across the wiki. Ultimately, the decision that I believe we reached was never really carried out, so I think we should reopen the discussion now that the wiki is more mature, as well as because I doubt anybody remembers the arguments we had back then to support one way or another.

For short-form dates, I would suggest the YYYY-MM-DD format. You see it for example in infoboxes, the date of birth and death for example. This is an international format that not only removes all ambiguity (such as MM-DD or DD-MM) but also makes it easier to order dates on computers if someone ever needs to pull this data.

For longer form dates, I'm not really sure. There's two accepted spellings in English: February 4, 2022 or 4th of February, 2022. The latter is a bit more old-fashioned and out of style, and might confuse some of our readers and writers who might not be 100% fluent in English. For that reason I would suggest the first proposition, i.e. February 4, 2022. In English, months are always Capitalised.

Once we decide on a spelling we'll have fun reformatting the whole wiki 😵‍💫

For long dates, you could try the long form ISO 8609 format: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601.

Also, could try a substitution tool on the pages to make the process faster.

I was editing Shinzo Abe's page (and his killer's, Yamagami Tetsuya) and noticed this interesting problem.

Shinzo is a first name, and Abe a last name.

However, Yamagami is a last name and Tetsuya a first name.

In some cultures, it is customary to put the last name first and even refer to people by their last name (In Japanese, Chinese and Korean that I know of).

However, in 2019 Japan switched conventions and agreed to use the First name-Last name convention for English romanisations.

This means Shinzo Abe (Fname-Lname) is correct per the Japanese gov guidelines, but then Yamagami Tetsuya (Lname-Fname) isn't.

This also changes how we would refer to people in articles: whether we would say "Abe died in July 2022" or "Shinzo died in July 2022".

Should we decide on a convention? We already use last names for theorists mostly, for example Marx or Engels.

Comrade @PrimersophiaXVII suggests us adding pronouns to articles about people in this style (see her message here):

• Firstname Lastname (they/them) is a...

I think it's redundant since the article, when describing the person, will inevitably use pronouns, thus making clear the gender of the person. But even for the sake of redundancy, this information could be presented in an infobox better than in the article body. The reason why is that people already have dates, which is shown under parenthesis, when they are presented:

• Iósif Vissariónovich Dzhugashvili (December 21st, 1878 — March 5th, 1953)
• Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 — 21 January 1924)
• Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (August 13th, 1926 — November 25th, 2016)

So they would be presented as

• Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (August 13th, 1926 — November 25th, 2016) (he/him)

That's my opinion, but if the majority disagrees with me, we can implement this nevertheless

The idea to use an an info box section is much smarter than using parenthesis in the article.

And secondly if redundancy was a problem, then having a person's name in the info box would also be unnecessary as it is often the first words of the article.

Take my view with a pinch of salt because I've not seriously thought about the editorial guidelines until I happened upon this discussion in the recent changes.

I pretty much agree with @Forte, in reading an article the info can be relayed to the user more elegantly/naturally. I also think it would be unnecessary to apply this standard to every individual (correct me if this is not what you are suggesting @PrimersophiaXVII) because the majority of individuals here are historical and did not even know about the T in LGBT, so the information would basically be redundant.

The idea of Lenin's infobox reading

• Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 — 21 January 1924) (he/him)

seems ridiculous, because transness has only become well-known quite recently, so his gender as a historical figure is self-evident. Now perhaps there are a couple exceptions where it would make sense because a person was especially involved in that field, in which case I think the article text itself would make it pretty clear anyhow. I don't like the idea of creating a standard which would be rarely applied - inconsistency leads to confusion.

"I also think it would be unnecessary to apply this standard to every individual... because the majority of individuals here are historical"

that's not what i had in mind, the fault of misunderstanding is probably on me there. When i said "when applicable," that was intended to exclude those who

1. haven't made their preferred pronouns public information for whatever reason, or

2. are historical figures, and therefore did not specify their preferred pronouns, as that was not a question at the time

in retrospect, i should have clarified that in the original proposal.

Got it. Applying it when applicable seems reasonable to me. Before I said "inconsistency leads to confusion", but thinking on it more I don't think that really applies here.

fell through, inconclusive

Comrade @Wisconcom has suggested that we need a systematic way of naming types of governments. I think bringing this discussion here would help have more ideas on it. Here is his message:

We need a regimented way of naming types of governments. For example, we ought to universally call capitalist governments which have major corporate influence in them a "corporatocratic republic" or a "corporatocracy". Or refer to capitalist regimes which lack as much corporate influence a "Plutocracy". Furthermore, this naming convention should be included in the editorial guidelines.

I agree with his position that we need a systematic approach to typology of capitalist states, governments, etc. This is a very interesting discussion in Marxism, even. But I disagree with his "corporatocracy" or "corporatocratic republic" and "plutocracy" examples.