Essay:ProleWiki news logs/18 July 2024

There hasn't been a news log for a while and accordingly, this one will be sizeable to catch up on everything. In chronological order:

Not finished

Patrolling group

This one didn't appear in any other news logs despite being formed in January 2024.

We changed our sourcing policy back then, and veered into an absolute position that every claim written on a page must be sourced in some way. This was done to combat defacement on one page that we became aware of, from someone we thought we could trust with editing. (It was the page for some ultra party so not like anyone was really going to care about what was on there anyway).

In less than 24 hours, we went from identifying the problem, devising a solution, make it workable, and implementing it. All steps of the design process achieved very, very rapidly.

The new sourcing policy was a huge success. We did point out to editors at the time that their edits would be reverted if they lacked a source, but that ended up not being much of a problem.

It ultimately makes our work easier when looking at it collectively and we found that it was sorely needed. This new policy also reinforces the content to our readers, who can be sure it's trustworthy and double-check for themselves.

Along with the new policy, we started a patrolling group that can be joined on demand, tasked with patrolling new edits and checking them off if they pass the sourcing policy. However, while there was some interest for this group in the beginning, it's mostly been maintained by just one editor (General-KJ) doing most of the patrols.

We get that it's not the most interesting task to be doing, but it's quickly become a very vital task to have. There's no way we could go back to not requiring references, and so we are looking at ways to get people interested in joining the patrolling groups... without much success yet.

Another problem we have yet to solve is the content on theory pages, that sometimes are rightfully the product of original research (more accurately, people naturally synthesizing all they've read and learned into their own conclusion). This can make it difficult to source, and we haven't really defined how to work on theory pages yet, but will surely find an answer eventually when the problem actually arises -- for now, they're not our most popular pages.

In any case, for now the patrolling group is tasked at the very least with auditing edits to make sure they comply with our sourcing policy. Anything on top of that can be done, but is not required, and it's likely the patrolling group will eventually pick up more tasks if we are able to get more people interested in it. Those tasks are linked to compliance in general, looking at respect for our principles and guidelines for example.

Moderation feature

We've rolled out a moderation feature in late June. We've wanted it for some time and have finally able to make the plugin work. From now on, anonymous users (or anon edits as we call them) can edit any "Main" namespace page. Their contribution then goes through a moderation page where the Trusted editors can either approve or reject the proposed edit.

We ran some stats for a week, and were happy to see the feature took. We had around 30 approved edits after one week, with comparatively few being rejected. Most of the rejections were because of sourcing issues, with only a couple trolling attempts. Which don't matter anyway, as we just reject them and move on, with nobody actually seeing the defacement.

We ran this as a pilot project for the first week with reassessment as needed afterwards, but no reassessment was needed and so we just kept the feature running.

I've said before that any time we were wary of rolling out a feature that gave people (either editors or readers) more liberties, it turned out to be a great decision.

The moderation feature was rolled out in June and basically is one month old at this time. The number of proposed edits did go down from the first week as expected, and in this case it's mostly attributable to two reasons: 1- summer vacation and 2- most edits were sent by two people, who probably edited everything they were able to -- either that or they're on vacation like everyone else.

Regardless, we're very happy that people can now edit without having to request an account. This has two benefits:

1- requesting an account is time-consuming, and we're aware of that. This cuts down the middleman so to speak, going straight to making an edit.

2- accounts that we might reject in vetting can still contribute in other ways. The only requirement for making an edit is that a (trusted) editor sees it as publishable.

I expect that down the line it will raise questions about how we relate to account creation and what getting an account on ProleWiki means, as the only benefits of having an account now is that you get to bypass moderation (though you're not free from other editors looking your contributions over), you don't leak your IP when you make an edit and you can become Trusted and decide on ProleWiki's direction and future.

Two new admins elected

We've also elected two new administrators to ProleWiki: Comrade:420dengist and Comrade:General-KJ are joining Comrade:CriticalResist and Comrade:Forte as full administrators.

The administration felt that new admins were starting to be needed, especially ones that were invested in the project and had some strategic vision for it to anticipate growth and the future. This need was also felt in the editorship, in terms of being able to moderate the server and seeing that the two sitting admins were overwhelmed by the amount of work needed in a growing editorship.

The question was raised to the (Trusted) editorship: who would you pick to make admin if you had that power? KJ and Ulaan (420dengist) were two of the most picked names, and also aligned with whom the sitting administration felt was needed at the time.

Later, the administration opened a vote to the editorship to confirm these two names, formalizing the decision.

The two new admins were thus elected on July 18 2024. They will go through some orientation to properly settle into their new role. We originally only wanted one admin but as everyone was torn between either ulaan or KJ, we opted to add them both.

We see that the administration is taking more and more the role of a facilitator (a real thing if you can believe it), where they're naturally gravitating towards a role of essentially making sure everything on ProleWiki works smoothly rather than taking decisions themselves. The new admins kind of solidify that too, as up until today all admins on ProleWiki were part of the old guard, participating in the project since the early days.