The consensus I see both inside and outside PW is that the library is pretty cool but a bit too empty still.
To help grow it, I've been thinking about letting in library editors. You could create a library editing account, which would be much easier to get than a "full" editor account.
This account would only have access to the library however, so as to add, edit and format books. With those permissions you could even translate books (chatGPT works great for this, much better than you'd expect), make reading lists, and probably do other stuff I haven't thought of yet. You would have access to all pages preceded by "Library:" essentially.
This would allow people who do not qualify for a full account or that we refuse for whatever reason to still participate in some capacity. Getting a library account would be much, much easier; there would be barely any questions (maybe 3-5).
For reference, this is the questions to get a full account: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount. There's even gonna be more questions soon, and we refuse a lot of requests, mostly from baby marxists and non-MLs.
It could also get you a foot in the door to later become a full editor more easily, doing the full vetting whenever you like after getting your library account and getting to know our processes, how we work, and just interacting with the community.
Now come the questions for this survey:
- Would you be interested in becoming a library editor over a full editor? Or would you just prefer to go through the "full" vetting process? Detail as much as you want here.
- If yes, how many hours a week do you think you could involve on the library? It's not a quota, it's just to get an idea of if this is worth pursuing.
- Is it clear to you what a library account is, and how it differs from the full account?
For now, we're just gauging interest in this. There's no process yet to add library editors, but if we go ahead with this we'll contact the interested comrades and invite them to make a library account.
(This is open to both Lemmygrad and Hexbear btw)
Thanks for reading and answering, as always your feedback is very much appreciated.
I think it’s a good idea to allow this to encourage the library to become its own distinct thing, personally
Would you be interested in becoming a library editor over a full editor? Or would you just prefer to go through the “full” vetting process? Detail as much as you want here.
If yes, how many hours a week do you think you could involve on the library? It’s not a quota, it’s just to get an idea of if this is worth pursuing.
Is it clear to you what a library account is, and how it differs from the full account?
Please and thank you 😁
Perhaps in the future.
I’m not confident that I would be doing enough to be measured in hours per week.
Yes, seems pretty clear to me.
I think it’s a good idea. Some people might be able to upload PDFs but not confident enough in their knowledge to update the wiki.
Would you be interested in becoming a library editor over a full editor? Or would you just prefer to go through the “full” vetting process? Detail as much as you want here.
If yes, how many hours a week do you think you could involve on the library? It’s not a quota, it’s just to get an idea of if this is worth pursuing.
Is it clear to you what a library account is, and how it differs from the full account?
Please and thank you 😁
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Maybe
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Idk, depends, a few at the least if I were a librarian
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Yes
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YES YES YES. PLEASE.
Would you be interested in becoming a library editor over a full editor? Or would you just prefer to go through the “full” vetting process? Detail as much as you want here.
Yes. I don't have what it takes to become a full editor (nor do I care about editing the other parts of PW). But I have thought of exactly this in the past. I already work on epubs of stuff (Although I work(ed) slowly, I finished Anarchism Or Socialism not too long ago.)
If yes, how many hours a week do you think you could involve on the library? It’s not a quota, it’s just to get an idea of if this is worth pursuing.
I have the time, I've got nothing but time, I'm mostly just "wasting" it. The only question is my ADHD, but if I can get myself to work on it, I can easily do some 2-4 hours in a day.
Is it clear to you what a library account is, and how it differs from the full account?
Yes. Lib account is for libs (Librarians)
if you're gonna use machine translation, I would suggest using something that is meant for translation rather than ChatGPT, which may just be hallucinating (e.g., this HN thread)
THANK YOU. I really don't understand why people keep using these things, they are weighted random word generators, they are shit.
I've heard deepl is pretty good at translating larger documents, but whoever is translating still should make sure to do a bunch of passes through the material to make sure it's correct.
I think there should be a much deeper consideration on translations because there are many subjective questions on it (i.e. if idiomatic expressions should be translated literally with footnotes or changed to a similar one in the target language) that have no one clear answer. But that's outside the scope of this thread.
I have heard good things about deepl as well. To your other point, Wikisource has a color-coded status for all pages (red - not proofread, yellow - proofread by 1 person, green - validated by another person). So some kind of status indicator like that could be good to show whether a translation has been checked or not.
What kind of texts are needed in the library? If there are some English works that could be added, I could help with that. I like fixing formatting and what not. In terms of translations I am useless because there aren't any prominent Hindi marxist texts that I know of.
I remember you have a full account on PW so i'm not going to reask the survey questions above lol
We're happy to get all sorts of works, first focusing on ML works but realistically you can add anything you like.
If you look at the Palestinian resistance reading guide in our library there are no Marxists authors in those recommended books (although I'm not sure about Illan Pappe) which I am in the process of uploading to the library. ML is preferred but in the future (I'm the library maintainer for PW) I'm wanting a lot more study guides in our library and some of those sources will come from historian's who may not be ML but who have written really informative books about X like Illan Pappe on Zionist Entity or John Mearshiemer's book on Israel Lobby. Using that as an example of when non ML sources can still be helpful.
Maybe when can bring back the old verification questions for this because they were a lot shorter.
This seems right up my alley. I probably wouldn't pass the full account process right now because my understanding is still a bit limited, but the one big reason I wanted to get an account was to add the Portuguese translations to some library works, and also fix transcription errors I find along my study.
Eventually I'd like to create a full account too, but this would smooth out the process a lot.
Edit: the questions
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Yes
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From 2 to 12 depending on my irl workload
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Yes
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I think it's a good idea as long as the restrictions are fairly easy to implement (or already part of MediaWiki)
How were the current library entries created? Based on existing transcriptions like those at marxists.org, Trotskyist revisions aside?
We found out we can block individual users from editing entire namespaces, so it would be as simple as blocking 2 or 3 namespaces for them, leaving only the library.
Could probably also do it with user roles but then you'd still have to do it individually and create it in the backend which is a mess.
Currently you can import texts from anywhere, though we try to distance ourselves from Marxists.org. I have a guide or two to help import from pdfs, we're looking at making them more prominent for newer editors.
