Leftypedia:Suggestions

This is the suggestion box, a space for general suggestions relating to the content of Leftypedia as well as the site itself.

If you can think of any sort of suggestion, it probably belongs here. Examples of possible topics include:

• Article topics that you want to see on the site
• Interesting or rare information that you think deserves a home, but you don't know where to put it
• Meta-suggestions about policies, administration, and organization
• Ideas for new site features

Some specific topics may be branched out into their own suggestion-type pages in the future.

Basic Manual of Style

• Commonwealth vs. American spellings?
• Hyphens? (see Marxism–Leninism vs. Marxism-Leninism)

Harrystein (talk) 16:37, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

Notability policy

Much of this website's content is dedicated towards documenting websites which lack any clear notability or relevance to leftist politics. In order to prevent this encyclopedia from being the subject of soap-boxers who are able to freely promote their web content, we should implement a definite notability policy. Thank you. SociusVenger (talk) 17:35, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi Wisconcom aka SociusVenger, thank you for your suggestion. We will be discussing a notability policy as the site develops. In the meantime, the policy will be determined on a case-by-case basis. I recommend clearly restating your case for non-notability on the talk pages (not LP:AFD) of the InfraWiki and ProleWiki pages. In addition, it is evident that 72 hours is too short for a small site such as this, so give users time to state their positions.

Finally, I would add that you have proven yourself prone to edit warring and other disruptive behavior on these topics. I have allowed you to remain on the site because you have shown at least a sporadic interest in contributing sourced information to other pages. I wonder how many contributions you have made to pages related to Enver Hoxha and his anti-Khrushchev positions which are not copy-pasted speeches or links to the blogposts of you or your friends. There is no reason for me to let you continue using this site purely to attack people who have banned you from one or two discussion forums out of the entire leftist internet. If you are interested in a website where you call everyone revisionist, I suggest you find another site. Harrystein (talk) 15:44, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your criticism. Regarding your last suggestion, I apologize if you got that impression of my intentions. I hope to use this site for productive purposes which are meaningful to Leftist politics. I likewise respect the position of this site relating to Left unity. While I have focused on documenting anti-revisionism and anti-revisionist writers in the past, this is largely because those topics are my area of interest and knowledge. I do not intend to abuse this site to extend online conflicts between me and ideologically opposed communities. SociusVenger (talk) 15:52, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Licensing for images and content

User:Jack barn made a good point at Talk:Main Page about the license used on this site. Harrystein (talk) 17:33, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Official names or common names?

For the title of articles relating to countries (particularly contemporary ones), shall we use the official name or common name (e.g. Federal Republic of Germany vs. Germany, French Republic vs. France, Russian Federation vs. Russia, etc.)? I bring this subject up as I have noticed that certain articles (such as United Kingdom) are titled with the short name of the countries, whereas others are titled with the official name of the country. Thank you. SociusVenger (talk) 14:59, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

The important question to me is about what the purposes of a leftist wiki are. People concerned about Marxist historiography and communist rhetoric surrounding the history of the UK are not interested in nitpicking about England, Wales, the British Isles et cetera. Whereas the DDR vs. BRD is clearly an important distinction.

I recommend a practical solution:

1. Pick one option for the short term. My vote is for a case-by-case discussion with a tendency towards redirecting common names to socialist-led states. See what I have done with Yugoslavia: plain name redirects to the full state name. "Germany" should go to the modern BRD (after 1990), since "East Germany" is the common name in English for that state. But if you want to be all "Communist Party of China" vs. "Chinese Communist Party" about it, then maybe we can poke fun at Wikipedia by sending "Germany" to the DDR page - the true Germany, as it were. At least that would be consistent. Lesser-known countries in the Anglo world, such as Albania (sorry) could easily go to the socialist Albania. (with a hatnote for the modern state.) Because how many people will be coming here to read about capitalist Albania over socialist? So it's a practical question.

Other takes:

• Russian Federation simply titled "Russia", with a "Russia (disambiguation)" for Tsarist and other history. Recent history of Russia is important in modern politics.
• Entire history of France simply titled "France". I can see an argument for limiting it to 1789-present.
• "China" = PRC since 1949. History of Chinese states, perhaps ending with the Xinhai Revolution, at "China (disambiguation)".

I realize these are inconsistent. Discussion is merited.

2. Make a list of such redirects/conflicts, such as Albania, Germany, etc. with all redirects and alternate names included. I would be willing to do this myself. That way when the decision is reversed we can just change them all at once.

Ultimately, whatever solution gets picked, title consistency isn't as important as redirects. If someone wants to get to a certain sense of "Germany", they should be able to click a couple of links and hatnotes and end up where they need to be. Harrystein (talk) 15:19, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I largely agree. It would likely be more preferable to settle this matter on a case-by-case basis. My only (small) disagreement would be that the GDR did not particularly claim to be the sole and true government of Germany in the way that the DPRK does in the case of Korea. SociusVenger (talk) 15:34, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Miscellaneous to-do list

1. Standardize spacing in editing (such as whether to put an empty line between headings and text, and whether to put spaces between text and equals signs (==Text== vs. == Text ==))
2. Improve the CSS of the main page, and in this figure out whether all CSS should be directly in the source of the page or whether the CSS should be divided among templates, like on ProleWiki and such. The new front page should look good at different zoom levels and resolutions as well as containing a short guide on how to contribute to the wiki. And maybe find another place to put the "MediaWiki setup info" section.
3. Probably merge the community portal into the main page because there's not much on both pages
4. Offer periodic (monthly?) backups of the site available for torrent and download
5. Deal with the spam filter not allowing edits to be posted that include links with, for example, "socialism" in the URL
6. Make level 5 and level 4 headings look distinct
7. Have a collapsible template for long quotes
8. Figure out what license is appropriate. Some kind of Creative Commons one instead of the current GNU FDL one?
9. Figure out whether Leftypedia should be hosted on its own domain and what service/country should be used so as to minimize censorship
10. Improve search engine optimization?
11. Prevent the visual editor automatically adding "" to the end of every article?
12. Figure out dark theming. Should users get a dark theme they can enable in user preferences? Or should there be a button on the page that enables it?
13. Allow the uploading of .svg and .pdf files
14. Have relevant articles linked in the OP of cyclical Leftypol threads (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, USA)