ProleWiki talk:Essays

deprecated

First, welcome to the new essays space. If you don't know how to use it as an editor, check the ProleWiki:User guide, it's all explained in there.

You need to add a template to your essay to make it appear on the feed and it will appear in order of newest to oldest created page. This means if you create your essay on the 12th and add the template on the 19th when your essay is finished, but someone else created an essay on the 15th, *your essay will appear below theirs because its page was created earlier*.

There is also no scheduling tool available (yet) for this page. As soon as you add the "infobox essay" template to your essay, it will appear in this feed in its proper slot.

We are going to name someone as an editor-in-chief (likely @420dengist who, for our editors not on the discord, has been really helpful with the essays space in general and some tech stuff) to take care of scheduling as well as proofreading and commenting essays. The position is still not entirely fleshed out.

Until then, I recommend everyone kind of pick their own publication time themselves on the main feed. I think we should avoid publishing too many essays at once because it will drown the page in content and make it difficult to get your essay seen. Something like one essay a day max seems good. E.g. if you see someone added an essay to the feed, then add yours tomorrow.

We'll also be posting essays to social media, if you don't want that to happen to your essay, notify us somewhere like on the essay talk page.

Hope everything makes sense, please bear in mind this essay page is brand new and will evolve as time goes on.

Following a proposal by the administration (that technically took place before we even thought about a new library maintainer but was only voted on recently), comrade @420dengist has been named editor-in-chief of the English essays section by an 12-0 vote taken by the trusted editors. The admins voted but the comrade in question did not.

He was recommended for this position due to his tech background (also knowing MediaWiki quite well), which is necessary for the new essays space that relies on lots of templates and code. He has also been with us for a while, mostly active on project discussions over editing, hence why some of our editors may not have seen him often on the wiki.

The editor-in-chief will have the following tasks:

• Offer ideas and improve the essays section in terms of functionalities, UX, etc.
• Decide on a posting schedule for essays so that we don't get into a situation where 5 new essays show up in one day on the feed and then nothing gets uploaded for 3 months.
• With author permission, make corrections to essays. It was also decided that authors who have not been active for 6+ months can see their essays edited without prior approval due to the difficulties in contacting them.
• Editing also means adding the infobox template to essays as well as images to replace the placeholder image for essays that don't have any.
• We hope we will also be able to start harmonizing the writing style in the essays space so that they look cohesive and thus more professional. Publications (journals, magazines, etc) employ editors-in-chief for this purpose as well, to make sure the voice of each writer fits their publication's style, so this is a step towards developping ProleWiki essays as a space that can stand on its own.
• The maintainer should also eventually become the first point of contact for questions about the essays space, but this will come in time once he is properly onboarded.