Editorial guidelines of ProleWiki

We have editorial conventions that help maintain a consistent style throughout the whole wiki. This discusses mainly form, not content.

Don't forget that the best way to learn how we can maintain a consistent style is by looking at how other articles are built. You can suggest changes in the discussion page.

Content pages

Title

Use preferably sentence case in the title of our articles except in the case for proper nouns.
The economic basis of the withering away of the state (do)
The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State (don't)
Use common names for titles, for the sake of improved readability. Full names (of persons) or official names (of countries or organizations) should be listed out in the first sentence, after the first bold mention of the common name. example: "Russia, officially the Russian Federation, is a country ... "
Be as specific as needed. For instance, Russian revolution can mean both the 1905 Russian bourgeois revolution and the 1917 Russian socialist revolution. In this case, a title which already disambiguates this difference is ideal.

Body

In the introductory paragraph of an article, use bold for when the subject of the article is first mentioned. This ensures the subject of the article is cited more clearly.

Historical materialism

From ProleWiki, the proletarian encyclopedia

Historical materialism broadly refers to applying the philosophy of dialectical materialism to the study of social life.

Bluelinking: Blue links made to other articles should be made only when they are first introduced in the article. This is to prevent readers from getting distracted by excessive use of blue links. (note how the second mention of Marxist-Leninist is not linked in the example)

ProleWiki is a Marxist–Leninist encyclopedia founded in September 2020 aiming to make information accessible to revolutionaries and those who wish to study revolutionary theory. We stand for the principles of anti-imperialism and we aim to combat the liberal hegemony in Western society by presenting a Marxist-Leninist understanding of political economy.

External links should not be used in the main body. If you need to use an external link as reference, then use it as citation. You can also create an "External links" section and put external sources there.

Citations

Avoid placing a citation after a space

Jeff Bezos is a parasite.^[1] (do)
Jeff Bezos is a parasite. ^[1] (don't)

Avoid placing a citation before punctuations

Without revolutionary theory,^[1] there can be no revolutionary movement.^[2] (do)
Without revolutionary theory^[1], there can be no revolutionary movement^[2]. (don't)

References

To format your citations, you can create a reference, click on "Cite" and choose "Basic" or press CTRL+SHIFT+K in Visual Editor, then you use the Textcite template and fill the information you have.This will produce a text like this:

Author (Year). Title of book in italics. Publisher. ISBN 12312312 [LG]

This is a preferred method because as a template, we can decide to change our formatting style, and it will make the changes in every place it is used.

If you wish to write it manually, you can generally follow these guidelines:

Books

Author (Year). Title of book in italics. Publisher. ISBN [number] (Library Genesis link)
Author (Year). 'Chapter inside single quotes' in Title of book in italics. Publisher. ISBN [number] (Library Genesis link)

Example in practice:

John M. Kirk (2015). Healthcare without borders: understanding Cuban medical internationalism. University Press of Florida. ISBN 0813061059 (Library Genesis link)
Clifford L. Staten (2005). 'Early Cuba: colonialism, sugar and nationalism: Cuba to 1868' in The history of Cuba. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781403962591 (Library Genesis link)

Articles

Author (Year). Title in italics. City: Publisher. doi:[code] (Sci-Hub link)

Example in practice:

Dic Lo (2020). State-owned enterprises in Chinese economic transformation: Institutional functionality and credibility in alternative perspectives. Journal of Economic Issues. doi:10.1080/00213624.2020.1791579 [HUB]

For articles with a doi code available, you can use our doi template

Library

Title

Book titles should be written in italics, followed by author. To do that, you can use the Title template. This is done so to differentiate articles written about the book in the main pages from the book itself in our library.

On authority, by Friedrich Engels

From ProleWiki, the proletarian encyclopedia

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely. (...)