First dev log to catalogue new changes and evolutions to ProleWiki. Big one as there is a lot to document.
In July of this year, a new library was unveiled, replacing the old one which was just a manually populated table.
In mid-September, we gave the same treatment to the Essays space, making it look more like a blog (it was also a table manually populated). The old essays space was alphabetically ordered which was not conducive to reading as one had no idea what an essay could be about and when it was published. This new system not only makes everything a bit more aesthetically pleasing but also provides an excerpt, allows to rename the essay easily, and automatically adds the essay to the feed.
Following these two changes, we named in late September - early October a maintainer for the EN library and a maintainer/editor in chief to the Essays space. Both were elected by the "trusted" editorship (editors with voting rights).
Their tasks will be to enhance their respective spaces, eventually delegating decision power to them -- still keeping in line with our principles though, especially on promoting democracy. The administration ought to still retain a right of veto though.
Their help also takes work away from the administration who can focus on other tasks. This is all part of our commitment to democracy, spreading high-level decisions and tasks outside of the current administration and training cadres (lower-level decisions such as editing pages, adding library works etc have always been in the hands of the editors).
On another topic, we also voted to allow our own forewords and annotations on the library works we host. This moves us from simply being a publisher (taking works from other sources, i.e. editors and simply republishing the contents) to being editors of our own. We ran a survey on our Lemmygrad community to gather some feedback before proceeding with the decision, and as expected everyone thought this was a good idea, but they were quite clear that they wouldn't want the annotations to be personal opinions, seemingly limiting them to what we envisioned: small corrections and contextualization.
To that end we made a new Foreword template with the new library maintainer and decided on an annotation (technically references) group.
Other webdev progress:
- Added JS code to make the library, essays, and upload files button appear on the sidebar on Citizen (September)
- Added JS code for a "fake" edit button to anon users (non-logged in readers). When clicked, redirects to a page explaining you need an account to edit. (September)
- Made a template for a clickable button. It's not a "real" HTML button but it works just like one either way.