one zoidberg

Thanks comrade 💪

The evolution of ProleWiki can essentially be broken down into three or four periods:

• The initial hype (2020-jan or feb 2021). Lots of interest, everything had yet to be made, this is where we saw all the language instances pop up and features such as the library and essays appear in their first incarnation (essentially just a table people filled up manually). Eventually interest subsided and people realized how much work it was going to take to make this thing from scratch.
• The lull years (2021-Q4 2022). Not much was happening during this time. Pages were still being made and we still advertised on social media etc, but it was pretty much day-to-day business as usual. The discord was almost entirely dead, there was essentially no community and very few editors. I haven’t said this anywhere else yet (and it’s history now), but at the time I was almost thinking of quitting the project (having been an admin since ~jan 2021) because we still had to go through account requests and discord vetting tickets, but it wasn’t going anywhere lol. But alas, I’m a very selective quitter. To be honest at the time I just wanted to write pages on philosophy and stuff, I didn’t really care to learn mediaWiki to help on the tech end of things. This period wasn’t really one of no growth or 0 activity whatsoever, it’s just that not much of interest happened on our end. We introduced the vetting questions for example in 2022 (before that you could write any introductory text you wanted) and grew our Twitter slowly (unfortunately by the patsoc admin so it required some cleanup afterwards when we banned him).
• Sudden activity (Q4 2022-Feb 2023). Starting around September 2022, we suddenly started getting activity. It started when three-four members joined on the discord at around the same time and started talking to each other, which eventually got more people to talk etc etc. We were able to recruit them as well, and from there interest in the project gradually went back up, on my end as well.
• Rationalization and opening up period (Feb 2023-now). This could arguably be part of the previous period. As things picked momentum, they reached a point around Feb. 2023 where we realized we had built a community and now needed to establish some processes as well as promote democratic centralism. We started sending account requests to the editors for example to be voted on. But we also asked questions about what we want ProleWiki to be, who we want to be editors, what the role of the admin team is, who we want to write for, etc. We’re still technically in this period, opening up tasks to the editorship that the admins otherwise would take care of. It’s also a period where we try more things out as we really have the resources (and ways to gather feedback) to do it now. We actually have a new library maintainer for example who should actually make a post very soon on this community.

Otherwise not too much has changed, Wikimedia archives all revisions of a page and you can see the old Library at Library/Archive and same for the Essays (just add that /Archive after the URL), you can then go into their revision history and look at the very first library for example. Personally I still find it strange that it only picked up 6-7 months ago, it feels like it’s always been this way on ProleWiki lol.

Leave a message on Forte’s discussion page about it! He maintains the PT instance

I think the idea was that each language of ProleWiki would create its articles organically rather than having everything translated from English.