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Welcome to ProleWiki!
This guide will help you understand how to quickly make an anonymous edit to a wiki page.
Requesting an account versus making an anonymous edit
Making an anonymous edit is faster than requesting an account. It's good if you want to make a small and quick edit, such as correcting a typo, adding a source, or rewriting a paragraph. Of course, you're allowed to edit anything on a page as an anonymous editor and we're excited to see what you may come up with! However, all anonymous edits go through a moderation queue before they are approved. They are usually approved in less than 72 hours.
Requesting an account takes time because you first have to answer vetting questions, and then our editors vote on your account request, which can take some time. However, once your account is approved, you can start editing without needing to go through the moderation queue each time.
With an account, you are also allowed (and encouraged!) to join our community of editors, including on Discord, and help shape ProleWiki by participating in its governance.
Things to know before you edit
There are a couple things you should know before making an anonymous edit.
First, your IP address will be logged in the Recent changes. To avoid this, we recommend using a VPN or similar.
We have a user guide that will teach you how to use the Visual Editor.
How to avoid getting your edit rejected
Anonymous edits are approved individually by the ProleWiki editorship -- they go through a moderation queue and do not instantly appear on a page. When deciding to approve, we look at each edit individually and do not consider past editing history. This means that one of your edit may be approved (in which case it will show up in the Recent Changes), or rejected (if you don't see it in Recent Changes after 72 hours, assume it has been rejected).
Here are some tips to help get your edit approved:
- Source every claim. You can source an entire paragraph with just one source if you want, but ideally we need to see that you're backing up your claims.
- The only claims that don't need sources is "clerical" stuff like a name, date, or location. This is stuff that anyone could find out by doing a 5-second Google search (not six seconds; five).
- Read our ProleWiki:Editorial guidelines (they're purposely short).
- You can format references by using the "Cite" button and selecting the proper template -- Book or scientific article, Website or newspaper article, etc.
- It is better to make a number of smaller edits rather than one big edit. This is because we can only approve or reject each edit by itself, we can't break it up.
- Make sure to correct grammar and typos before submitting. We normally won't do this for you as we promote a philosophy of cleaning up after oneself.
- If you want to avoid having to go through the moderation queue, request an account!
Sometimes, we may approve an edit so that it gets saved in the Page History, and then remove it. The reason for removal will usually be given in the edit summary, and the prior approval means that you can access the Page History to rework it.
You are expected to fix your edit yourself, as are our editors in regards to their own edits.
Access page history
You can click the "View history" button on any page to look at its revision history. Every edit that has been committed to a page is saved there, and can be accessed. On mobile, that button looks like a clock with an arrow circling around it (see above). If you click on it, you will be taken to the revision history page:
By clicking on the date and time of any edit (in this case, 19:16, 3 November 2023 is highlighted), you will be able to open the revision on that date. Then click the edit button and start editing a prior revision -- normally, one of your own revisions that has been saved but then removed.
How to anonymously edit a page
For the time being, only "main" pages can be edited. These are pages with no colon prefix. For example, you may edit Bourgeoisie, but not Library:Value, price and profit or Portal:Marxism as the latter two have a prefix. If there is no edit button on a page, it means you cannot edit it.
To start editing, simply look for the Edit button in the top-right corner of the page on desktop or the pencil icon in the bottom-right corner of the page (while scrolling up) on mobile. Pictures below (highlighted in yellow):
This will open the visual editor (check out the user guide to learn what you can do with it) and you can start editing. When you're ready to save, click on "Save changes" in top the right corner and provide a summary of what you changed.
We recommend using a desktop browser to edit.