ProleWiki:Hub

Discussion board focused on improving the work at ProleWiki, defining our goals and achieving them

TL;DR: Wisconcom is an opportunist wrecker who tried again to infiltrate ProleWiki and change it to whatever ideology suits his anti-China propaganda. CommissarMar was one of the accounts he used to do this.

The way account requests work on ProleWiki is that only a few select people are able to see the requests itself. Mainly because it contains sensitive details about the machine requesting an account which we prefer to preserve to protect the privacy of incoming requests. However, those sensitive details can be useful to verify sockpuppet accounts, prevent accounts with illegitimate or harmful intent, etc.

Recently, we received a request which some of us could tell it was written by a particular user which has attempted to infiltrate ProleWiki for months. We could also see the user was trying its best to conceal their identity. But we proceeded with the request as usual, voting on it and collectively discussing requests. The administrators pointed out the similarities with Wisconcom. At first we decided we were going to allow them in, patrol their edits, before they attempted to wreck the wiki. But some editors took issue with their edits, and their behavior further increased our suspicions it was Wisconcom, and thus a new voting session was held and there and then the majority of editors chose to ban Commissar/Wisconcom again.

I was against this decision, because I'm more pragmatic when it comes to improving and developing the encyclopedia. If someone is interested to work, why not? Provided they do good edits, there's no problem in letting them in. In the case of Wisconcom, some editors took issue with his edits. In my opinion, they weren't too bad, most of them were irrelevant, some were fine, and some were mildly bad. Still, it was only a short experiment, and I think no true lesson can be learned from this.

The major problem I see is the matter of expectation. How can we expect good faith edits from an user which has actively found ways to infiltrate, sabotage and disrupt our work? It's okay to make mistakes, everyone does, but how can we tell it's a mistake, and not an act of disruption? When you tarnished your image with your actions, it's hard to tell.

For a few months, right after we updated MediaWiki in early 2023, we faced an issue with the talk pages. Whenever we tried using the VisualEditor in the talk pages, we were given this nasty error:

[X6akA72QQzSDKWPFYEuVSAAAAAU] Exception caught: Conversion from 'html' to 'wikitext' was requested, but core's Parser only supports 'wikitext' to 'html' conversion

I'm glad to finally announce that this issue has been fixed and we are now able to use talk pages with Visual Editor again.

Have a question about how the Prolewiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Comrades is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help. It's not for everything, though.

Ask the Comrades is for: -->General questions about the wiki, how it works, and how to do things. -->Reports of problems with wiki articles, or requests for help with wiki articles. -->Reports of misbehavior or abuse by other Comrades.

Ask the Comrades is not for: -->Asking bug reports. See [Link to bug report page] -->Asking for new wiki features. See [Link to wishlist] -->Chatting with other comrades. See our social media hub and ProleWiki:Hub -->Proposing new pages. Prolewiki is focused on marxist theory, political-economy, history and current events from a marxist perspective. If you think the prolewiki needs page x,y, or z, and they are within that scope, add them!

This was immediately depreciated by the creation of an equivalent page on the main wikispace. https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Ask_the_comrades

The question would exist to root out Zionists. Comrade Amicchan ^(talk) 17:26, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Some time ago, we completely revamped our verification questions. You can read the new ones here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount.

Essentially, we separated them into primary and secondary tiers. When requesting an account, you have to answer all primary questions, and then pick 5 secondary questions of your choice to answer.

In those primary questions, we specifically chose to keep this one:

• 4. What is your understanding of gender? Should Marxists support the LGBT community?

To ProleWiki, support for the LGBT community is not a question.

The reason for that is that we have many LGBT comrades helping us out on ProleWiki. If we allowed someone who did not support your community (or worse, openly phobic of it), we would essentially show ourselves to be antagonistic towards LGBT comrades and issues.

How could we reconcile letting our LGBT comrades work alongside people who harbour resentment against them? Even if they don't edit related pages or don't get in conflict with other editors, there is no reason you should have to share a space and work alongside this type of person.

For this amply sufficient reason, there is no way we would let someone who openly condemns the LGBT community receive an account on ProleWiki. Just earlier, we've banned an IP because that person not only tried to request an account 3 times (after we sent him an email about this specific question the first time), but this time told us that they "hate" the LGBT community.

Such a person will never be welcome on ProleWiki.

Dear comrades editors,

Our first ever formal fundraiser was a huge success. Not in the sense that we achieved more than our stated goal, but in the sense that we achieved our goal in just 5 days thanks to an outpouring of support from our editors, Lemmygrad, and Hexbear.

We asked for 528 dollars to cover 2 years of a new hosting plan, as we are going to need more disk space soon (this will double it, as well as essentially double all of our VPS resources).

We received 518 dollars after fees, just short of 10$ which we can easily cover with Forte or, since the contract is renewed later this year, might receive in the meantime.

We also made 8 patrons on Patreon and receive more than enough there to cover our yearly hosting costs, provided however that they remain patrons for a full 12 months.

Finally, we also sold our crypto which had been sitting for a while (and actually gained in value). Our strategy regarding crypto, now that we've been able to sell it, is to accept it but convert it to fiat as soon as we see it, so that it doesn't depreciate and one's donation in XMR or BTC remains as close as possible to their intent.

This brings our account to a total of ~815 USD, which is enough for 3 years of hosting!

I would first like to formally thank everyone who has donated to our wiki. This success, achieved in under a week, shows our work -- your work -- is appreciated, valued, and useful. It is not thankless.

And finally, we urge every editor who is not on our Discord to join it as soon as possible, as this is where we will discuss what to do with the excess, if anything. The excess in this case is defined as anything above the money needed for 2 years of hosting, currently 528 USD. Essentially, every editor is invited to propose and vote on what to do with this extra money. I think for now the administration will audit every proposal (for cost, deployability, usefulness, etc) but we are excited to try out this model as we have been rapidly opening up our internal democracy since January.

The goal is not to spend this money, but with an excess we can start thinking about some expenses that might make sense for the goals of ProleWiki.

ProleWiki was started in September 2020 with much fanfare. In the early months already, dozens of editors had joined and believed in the project. This early success forced the project to quickly adopt mechanisms to ensure its survival and continuity, which we will detail in this document.

This document is not binding to our principles; it details how ProleWiki acts, and how it has been acting in the past. It was written and validated by the administration team, consisting currently of Forte and CriticalResist.

While ProleWiki strives to establish a proper democratic centralist structure, we have learned from the past that it is not currently feasible based on our numbers.

ProleWiki remains quite young. We passed our 2 year anniversary just a month ago. Due to the very large scope such a project entails, we have lots of decisions to make -- on editing guidelines, on principles, on who to let in as an editor, on pages to patrol for changes, etc. These decisions require decisional power guided by the original vision set out for ProleWiki, the reason it was founded: to be a proletarian encyclopedia for Marxist-Leninist learning.

Furthermore, we need to protect our aims and objectives (as found in the Principles) and due to our activity and interest from many comrades with different ideological outlooks (as well as outright detractors, for example fascists), the administration believes it needs to have this decisional power to safeguard the project.

The administration was not always what it is. In the early days of ProleWiki, we saw a lot of hype and the administration team was gigantic, to say the least. This was a mistake; it was too early to make an assembly out of the administration. It became impossible to take any decision as not everyone was equally interested in participating. Soon, ideological differences came up without any way of settling them. We were paralysed and spent more time in struggle sessions than actually writing on the wiki. That was about the time we decided to make our principles clear.

The administrators remaining after this initial wave were simply those that stayed interested in the project and did not leave. One was invited but left due to lack of time to commit, another was removed for betraying the project, leaving just two administrators currently. New administrators are approached individually based on their trustworthiness, involvement in the project, and general personality. While we are only two administrators, we would like to form a triumvirate of three administrators at the very least so as to diversify our range of ideas and capacity to act.

At this time, we look for administrators that align with the principles of the project. Learning from our past, we do not want a repeat of the fiasco from when the administrator team included anyone that momentaneously wanted in.

There remains lots of work to do on the wiki. Our editorial guidelines, our principles did not come out of nowhere, but were the results of days and weeks of assessing, debating, and writing – labour. To say nothing of the technical aspects, such as setting up and maintaining hosting, bringing outside talent to the project when needed, setting up namespaces, templates, and other MediaWiki software specificities. We cannot, at this time, be bogged down in struggle sessions or looking over the shoulder of every editor to patrol their edits. Not while we are so few to participate.

Currently, our editors act mostly as auditors towards the administration. They are encouraged to voice their criticisms on our principles and decisions, but the decision remains with the administration. This is the only way ProleWiki is currently able to function and keep working.

Editors have to request an account on the wiki by answering questions, which the administrator team can either accept or deny. These questions are based on our principles. Originally, this measure was put in place to counter spam from bot accounts. However, we soon found it necessary to keep this measure in place so as to avoid defacement. It did happen, before this measure was in place, that people anonymously edited pages to fit their biases. This would mean extra work from our editors to undo the defacement – time that could be spent on writing instead. These defacers usually are not interested in helping the wiki or actually providing knowledge, they are interested either in undermining the project or being contrarians to the "established" outlook of ProleWiki. Essentially, without any interest for the well-being of ProleWiki and appreciation for the work that went into providing them this platform, they use it as their personal soapbox.

We must remember that ProleWiki exists on the internet and is not in charge of a country. There are people online, and we have had to deal with them, that want nothing more than to wreck projects, or care more about the purity of the ideological content than actually building something. Whereas in real life they would be investigated before their attempt or even be powerless to effect change, on ProleWiki they would find their voice amplified if left to their own devices.

Conversely, we have accepted users that did not agree 100% with our principles and let them edit on the wiki as well, to encourage different viewpoints and interpretations of Marxism-Leninism.

Our current system evidently works and rarely gives rise to difficulties or issues. In two years of existence, we have found active editors and the wiki now contains almost 1800 articles, with many being incredibly detailed. This averages out to 2.5 articles a day. People that are interested in simply writing can do so without worrying about the politics going on behind ProleWiki, and the people that want to take a more involved role can submit requests to the administration for discussion.

ProleWiki remains a Marxist-Leninist encyclopedia as an inalienable principle of the project. ProleWiki is not Wikipedia, and does not claim to be neutral or unbiased. ProleWiki is not a catch-all Marxist encyclopedia that lets all currents and ideologies express themselves equally: it is a proletarian encyclopedia, and we believe Marxism-Leninism to be the most advanced revolutionary theory towards the liberation of the proletariat.

I have some questions on points that I would like elaboration on:

While ProleWiki strives to establish a proper democratic centralist structure, we have learned from the past that it is not currently feasible based on our numbers.

• What experience (or event) did you derive this from?
• Why would a democratic centralist structure not work in small numbers?
• How many (active) users are on Prolewiki?

Conversely, we have accepted users that did not agree 100% with our principles and let them edit on the wiki as well, to encourage different viewpoints and interpretations of Marxism-Leninism.

• Is there a system of thought that corresponds to when users don't need to agree with certain principles?

> What experience (or event) did you derive this from?

In the very beginning of the project, we brought many editors and let most of them into what we now call administrative positions. They did not necessarily have access to accounts and other sensitive info, but they could make decisions to guide ProleWiki. Note that this was before I became an admin, but what we found out was that everyone had their own idea of what PW should be and ultimately, we spent more time debating than actually doing anything. Most of those editors eventually left the project due to a lack of interest (if I remember correctly) and we had to rebuild a new structure.

> Why would a democratic centralist structure not work in small numbers?

In our opinion (Forte and me), it was more efficient for the project to have executive power remain between the administrators considering the age, numbers, goals and general context of our project.

For example, we were and are still wary of potential trolls or wreckers joining -- this is a problem with all online projects.

Derived from my own experience as a moderator in the past, I generally don't want to give too much power to users because you never truly know you who are dealing with (see for example Wisconcom). Also, I've noticed people don't really care about what goes on behind the scenes as long as the website (any website) works and they're given enough liberty on it. I think this makes sense because it's not really their lives or livelihood at stake, it's just a website.

Certainly though editors are allowed to propose changes and for a while now we've made them more involved in administrative processes. Changes on our principles for example are voted on (and proposed) by the editors and so are most new account requests. This is mostly done on the Discord though as Wikimedia is terrible for this kind of discussion, so we might actually make that clearer to new editors that they should join the discord.

> How many (active) users are on Prolewiki?

There is a page here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers that shows Active Users based on at least 1 action in the last 30 days.

Generally I would say we are about 10 active editors, i.e. editors that edit every day or every 2 days. We've recently accepted 5 new editors too.

> Is there a system of thought that corresponds to when users don't need to agree with certain principles?

There's not any outlined process at this time. We evaluate their answers in the account request and might ask them more since they give their email. We generally look that they agree to our principles (which is a question), but sometimes it's difficult because they might say they agree to our principles, and then in later answers show they clearly do not.

100% (personal) agreement to the principles is not required, however PW pushes a certain line (ML) and so even if an editor does not agree with something, we ask that they at least contribute as if they agree to it. E.g. if an editor disagrees that China is socialist (contrary to our principle that China is AES), we might let them in, but look that they don't start reworking the whole page to remove mentions of socialism on the PRC.

I think generally we want to see maturity from our editors, in the case they don't entirely agree with the principles, i.e. that they understand why ProleWiki is the way it is and they don't try to go against it sneakily or push their own opinions in our articles like trots, lol.

Hope this answers your questions.

In our opinion (Forte and me), it was more efficient for the project to have executive power remain between the administrators considering the age, numbers, goals and general context of our project.

For example, we were and are still wary of potential trolls or wreckers joining -- this is a problem with all online projects.

Derived from my own experience as a moderator in the past, I generally don't want to give too much power to users because you never truly know you who are dealing with (see for example Wisconcom). Also, I've noticed people don't really care about what goes on behind the scenes as long as the website (any website) works and they're given enough liberty on it. I think this makes sense because it's not really their lives or livelihood at stake, it's just a website. Certainly though editors are allowed to propose changes and for a while now we've made them more involved in administrative processes. Changes on our principles for example are voted on (and proposed) by the editors and so are most new account requests. This is mostly done on the Discord though as Wikimedia is terrible for this kind of discussion, so we might actually make that clearer to new editors that they should join the discord.

I see where you're coming from, and I agree with you (Though Discord is a u.s social media platform, so I think we should seek an alternative if possible.)

We could apply democratic centralism to just the leadership or administrative positions and only after an amount of time participating.

There's not any outlined process at this time. We evaluate their answers in the account request and might ask them more since they give their email. We generally look that they agree to our principles (which is a question), but sometimes it's difficult because they might say they agree to our principles, and then in later answers show they clearly do not. 100% (personal) agreement to the principles is not required, however PW pushes a certain line (ML) and so even if an editor does not agree with something, we ask that they at least contribute as if they agree to it. E.g. if an editor disagrees that China is socialist (contrary to our principle that China is AES), we might let them in, but look that they don't start reworking the whole page to remove mentions of socialism on the PRC. I think generally we want to see maturity from our editors, in the case they don't entirely agree with the principles, i.e. that they understand why ProleWiki is the way it is and they don't try to go against it sneakily or push their own opinions in our articles like trots, lol.

Hope this answers your questions.

It does. Thanks.

I don't get it, you're saying that you need people to create German pages, but when I wanted to create the page for Imperialism in German and translate it from the English page, it told me that I don't have permission to create a new page??? Like you want me to help or no?

Sorry, comrade, since your account is very new it takes a few edits for you to get permissions to create pages, but don't worry, I can create the pages for you meanwhile, sorry for the inconvenience. I created the page for Imperialism in German ProleWiki (Imperialismus)

Alright thank you very much! I started to edit some German pages yesterday and I hope to be able to also create new pages soon

Someone, or a group of people/devices reported in bad faith our website as associated with phishing, but it was later resolved by mass reporting ít as a false positive.

I haven't encountered any particular signs of malware; so it's strange for ProleWiki to be marked as a bad site.

I saw early this morning, I don't know what happened. I will be reporting it here: https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/?hl=en

This link is to report incorrect phishing warnings, obviously our case. Other editors should do the same to increase the likelihood this is reverted

I just noticed. I don't believe in coincidences; I believe someone is clearly trying to get our site delisted.

Edit: might want to scan our pages for possible hacks too.

The message I sent (feel free to copy paste but change it up just a bit):

"ProleWiki is its own original project running the MediaWiki software and as such cannot be a phishing website.

In addition, Prolewiki does not distribute malware, spyware or anything of that nature and, in fact, does not distribute files at all (except for embedded pictures if we want to be technical).

The website has existed since 2020 without any issues, running the same software since that time, and as such this is clearly someone with a grudge trying to get this website delisted."

I just noticed. I don't believe in coincidences; I believe someone is clearly trying to get our site delisted.

— CriticalResist

As Google has CIA agents within it's leadership; it's very possible that they conspired to report this page, or collaborated with someone.

I don't think that's likely. Either Google falsely flagged prolewiki (but nothing substantial changed in several months, so why now?) or some patsocs or disgruntled banned user didn't like what we said.

If the CIA wanted to shut us up they could just seize the domain and switch the whole thing off. We'd still have backups though.

I agree.

Looks like the dangerous site popup is gone.

Comrades, you have been aware Wisconcom was blocked recently. Many already understand why this decision was made, but I think this should be further detailed.

Wisconcom entered ProleWiki on 10 June 2022 and almost immediately displayed commitment through his constant editing. He made quality edits and has displayed an interest in the project as a whole. However, since he entered our Discord server, we immediately came into contact with his views on certain subjects. He has denied the Nazi character of the Ukrainian state, has denounced the war between Ukraine and Russia as an inter-imperialist conflict, declared that the People's Republic of China is a "capitalist state" and that even during the governance of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party of China was a "social-fascist revisionist party". Some of these views can be read in the talk page of Socialist market economy article.

Even though Wisconcom was in explicit opposition to our principles, we allowed his presence in the project, just dealing with a few problems here and then. He began engaging with others in the ProleWiki community in Lemmygrad, and his interactions can be seen here. He basically was an anti-China militant in his Lemmygrad presence, and eventually created a Hoxhaism community dedicated almost exclusively to promote anti-China propaganda. This behavior would eventually render him a ban in Lemmygrad. Still, even though we have a close relationship with the Lemmygrad community and administration, we decided not to ban Wisconcom inside ProleWiki, provided that he improves his behavior.

Wisconcom in fact improved his behavior over time, and his commitment to the project would render him a position as a member of ProleWiki's agitprop commission. However, we would still notice small conflicts here and there, but they would be resolved in a short time. Until in 16 October, Wisconcom deleted a massive portion of the article on the Shining Path without consultation, claiming the article was anti-communist in tone because the Shining Path was described as terrorists, but terrorism in this context is merely a description of a tactic, such as discussed by Lenin here. It appears Wisconcom showed sympathy to the Shining Path merely because they were anti-China, because they were also fiercely anti-Albanian, and this did not bother Wisconcom at all. Besides that, he routinely deleted his own messages, which made communication and accountability very difficult.

After being criticized both inside the Discord server and in his private messages after engaging personally with me, Wisconcom decided to leave ProleWiki on his own, and added a "RETIRED" in his profile on ProleWiki. Even though Wisconcom was difficult to work with, the editors lamented this decision, but we eventually accepted it. Since he left, he temporarily changed his social media profile to display he was a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, and even changed his profile picture to the Shining Path hammer and sickle. for reasons unknown. A few days later, Wisconcom reached to my talk page demanding that we give him positions inside the wiki, and that we allow so-called "anti-revisionists" inside the wiki. His demands were denied, and since then we immediately ended our relationship with him, and decided to block him on ProleWiki. We have been extremely permissive with Wisconcom, and they showed they are not to be trusted, mainly because of his unstable and suspicious behavior.

He could be reinstated in the future, if agreed by other editors, but considering his Twitter profile, he doesn't seem much interested in having a dialogue with any of us.