Comrades, you might not be aware that ProleWiki hosts a whole library of texts and books.
You can visit our library here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Library
The reason you might not know about it is because it's something we set up quickly when PW was born, and since then it just kinda got filled up, and now the layout is a mess to sort through.
Based on our own data, people don't really read the library but our feedback shows that they appreciate it overall when they start using it.
Today, PW is starting an auditing project to 1. Figure out what the library needs updating and 2. setting about doing it.
The first phase of our project is to collect more feedback on the library, and for that we've set up a survey: https://questionpro.com/t/AX7J7ZySkD
We'd really appreciate if you could take it (takes around 3 minutes)! It would help us immensely.
Thanks!
Y'all form a very active community, we've gone from ~20 to 70 survey responses and it was all thanks to you on Hexbear!
I'll spoiler some of our conclusions from this survey; if you haven't done the survey yet, you should do it before reading this so that you don't get primed.
spoiler Results
Many people were not even aware ProleWiki has a Library! This is on us, it doesn't appear on the barebones mobile menu.
Nobody seemed to have any issues finding Rosa's book (that question simulated how someone would be looking for a book on the library without knowing the name). So that's pretty good. The most common method was to look in the sidebar, as expected. That sidebar doing a lot of good work tbh. Except on mobile, because there is no sidebar there on the mobile theme. People rated their experience finding the book an overwhelming neutral, meaning it's good design. It's not super amazing, but it's not terrible enough that people would notice. So definitely keep that sidebar index.
But where things get interesting, is that when presented with the mockup I drew up, you overwhelmingly prefer it to the current library index (only 1 rating below 3/5, imagine that). Yet when you were previously asked on various adjectives to qualify our library, the results were also mostly positive. I think this is explained by the fact that for many responders, this was the first time they used the library and they didn't spend too much time looking through it except for what the questions asked. The biggest feedback on the mockup was that the portraits made it easier to find an author. Now we get to chip away at our brains to figure out how to implement this thing 😵💫
On individual books, you all definitely like our layout more than other online libraries, which is pretty cool 😁 Hope you'll start doing your reading on ProleWiki from now on! FYI you can print as PDF by doing Ctrl+P, but the formatting is not really great. You also like our library's index more than other online libraries, but only slightly.
Finally, the content that you want to see in our library is, thankfully, pretty much what we have already: socialist texts, of course, as well as transcripts and official/historical documents. Audiobooks also were one of the top choices, which we don't have yet. We might look at integrating a TTS service if possible (MediaWiki is not Wordpress, it's finicky, and we don't have enough money to pay a developer lol).
Overall, lots of excellent feedback! What we clearly need to do first is advertise the library more and do a better job at it, because loads of people were not aware we had it.
We are definitely going to be doing surveys again in the future, they're a great auditing and self-crit tool. Did you know the CPC is the biggest consumer of surveys and polls in the world? We will follow Xi's good example 🫡