Essay:ProleWiki news logs/Future ideas

Future ideas for ProleWiki, in no particular order. Often the result of a brainstorm session.

Editors are free to add their ideas (please sign with your username in parentheses).

Last update: 2024-02-28

Maintenance

• Eventually clean up all unused categories and merge similar categories into one. This will likely be a neverending task. (Crit)
• Move everything that is reused on the website into templates for easier maintenance in the future. Unsure if there is anything left to move though. (Crit)
• Change references made from books in our wiki pages to use our library works instead of external PDFs or sources where applicable. Fix with Mass Edit Regex? (Crit)
• Communication happens mostly on the Discord, but some editors use the Matrix space, others are on neither. Works for now as most everyone is on discord, but can become problematic if the ratio equalizes. (Crit)
  • We are in the presence of setting up a bridge between the matrix and Discord for relevant channels. (Crit)
• Keep everything on MediaWiki as much as possible to make it easier to manage (that way editors don't need extra accounts elsewhere). (Crit)

Maintainers

Following the naming of Library and Essays maintainers + the intsec group, we could also look at the following groups (or individual maintainers):

• Compliance group: a group not connected to the editorship or administration that makes sure we comply with our principles and rules. Especially important to oversee the administration. Probably not needed for a looong time though. (Crit)
• Agitprop group: responsible for social media work, would essentially manage agitprop mostly by themselves as they want to. (Crit)
• Wiki audit group: a group that goes over wiki pages, correcting typos, applying categories, templates (such as infoboxes), tracking empty pages and stubs, etc. Would also be in charge of contacting editors about their edits. Preferably not connected to the editorship. (Crit)
  • A partial audit group has been created in Jan 2024, tasked with patrolling all new edits to ensure compliance with sourcing (all claims must now be sourced). (Crit)
• Onboarding group: Could be in charge of recruiting new editors more personally than the request account system we have in place, could help with onboarding new editors (helping them around the wiki, patrolling their edits, answering questions, etc). Could be the same as the wiki audit group. (Crit)
  • We find that we recruit most people from outside the wiki and not from our readers, which makes sense. Developing a group tasked with recruitment is also possible. (Crit)
• Spokesperson: a role that is tasked with taking care of replying to email, Twitter DMs, etc, as a spokesperson. Need someone with experience there or who is very diplomatic. (Crit)
  • Could also be tasked with Public Relations, monitoring our reputation and mentions online. (Crit)
• Finances maintainer: updates our finances table every month from the data we send them. Would not have access to the finances themselves, just the required data. (Crit)
• Language instances maintainers: we have them for the ES, FR and PT instances (though the latter two are technically the PW admins). They're in charge of growing their language instance, porting modifications from the EN instance to theirs, relaying questions from the editors to the administration, etc. This is an involved role, as changes are first made in the EN instance, the blueprint, and must then be manually copied to other instances. (Crit)
• Data analysts/SEO/etc: run surveys, look at website analytics, do stats to determine in which direction to take the project, always putting the reader first. Preferably filled with people who have some experience with this. (Crit)

^ If you're a ProleWiki editor and want to work in one of those maintenance roles, contact the PW administrators.

Essays

• Make the sidebar items collapsible. This is technically feasible (see Template:Sidebar with collapsible lists) but will need some study. (Crit)
• Fix picture display if possible. The aspect ratio is different on the feed vs. the essay itself. (Crit)

Library

• Resize all card items to save disk space (makes the library homepage load faster as well). (Crit)
  • This was done by our first library maintainer Comrade:Emby but requires optimizing for every new picture we add to the library. (Crit)
• Eventually it's going to need more cards and maybe subcategories as well as it grows. (Crit)
• Host things (transcripts, works, documents) that we know people look for. This gets SEO traffic, which means new readers. For example Yellow Parenti's transcription is our most read library text with 90% of the traffic coming from search engines. (Crit)
• Several M&E texts are empty, definitely need to import them. (Crit)
• Remove texts imported from MIA and import from another source, on the basis that they edit texts they don't like and don't necessarily admit it. Maybe there's an easier or more efficient way of going about this? (Crit)
• Add forewords and annotations to texts that need it, for example when sourced from MIA or when topical. (Crit)
• A 'silver bullet' that would turn importing books into a step-by-step method, either a script or similar that can extract everything from an epub and require only a copy and paste on the wiki. From there, we can turn these pages back into a PDF with the new Collection extension. (Crit)

Tech stack

• Find a cloud storage provider (bucket) to host images and send backups to. Wasabi seems cheap (7 USD a month for 1TB storage), have to see their availability rating. Not needed yet, but will be as we approach the limits of our disk space. (Crit)
• Host our own Lemmy instance for editors or a Focalboard server (or similar, e.g. Appflowy) for tech project management. Just thrown around as something to write down somewhere for now. (Crit)
• Our new library maintainer (420dengist) has mentioned he would like some way of seeing edits made to the library from his phone. It should be possible to use the same system we have for the recent-changes channel on the Discord, but filter specifically by Library edits or library editors? (Crit)

Branching out

Stuff other than the Wiki (there's already the library and essays for example)

• News articles (Crit)
• Podcast (Crit)
• More youtube videos, perhaps even longer form than what we've done so far (like documentaries and video essays etc). Even putting someone as the face of the videos? (Crit)
• Newsletter. Could almost be made automatically, taking the biggest edits of the week, new pages of the week, etc. and automatically sending out once a week. Still a very important tool in the 2020s, don't overlook it! (Crit)
• Do more opinion and feedback surveys. Very important to get a proper feel for how ProleWiki is being used and read. Could host our own Framaforms instance to self-host our surveys. (Crit)
• Reach out to orgs, projects and content creators to keep a line of communication open, which could then develop into something else? Not sure what yet, but always good to have this kind of good will relations. (Crit)

Funding

• Find some grants we could apply for? (Crit)
• Distribute PDFs of our pages (now doable) and advertise that people can donate if they enjoy the PDF. (Crit)
  • Also check lulu.com which can print books on demand for consumers. (Crit)
• Savings are otherwise secure. We keep 2 years worth of essential expenses saved up. We also have patreons which creates savings over time and reduces the need to do fundraisers like we did for the new hosting plan early 2023. At our current monthly revenue rate, we can pay our yearly essential expenses every 6 months, so this is more than sustainable. (Crit)

Uses

• Improve tech stack. Better VPS = more services we can host on it, generally faster loading times, etc. (Crit)
• Advertise? (Crit)
• Get tools we could need to do better agitprop work or wiki work. (Crit)
• Distribute prints of our pages made from PDFs, as actual books. (Crit)
• Possibly hire professionals on a contractual basis (e.g. translators, video editors, graphic designers etc) but problematic because otherwise everyone is a volunteer, it doesn't make sense to pay some people but not others. On the other hand if the only way we can get someone with very particular skills to help is by hiring them for a job, that could also be discussed. (Crit)
• Get the full matomo suite, but it's 1500 USD per year. I guess self-hosting your data has no price though. But it would definitely help us understand how people read ProleWiki better. (Crit)