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.

Content ideas

Consider these resources/ideas for articles. Find a use for them in at least one article, though they often have a place in many.

Unsorted

• https://theirishmarxistleninist.wordpress.com/2018/02/23/anti-communist-myths-debunked/
• https://www.scribd.com/document/422546448/Anti-Communist-myths-debunked-pdf
• https://pastebin.com/y4CVgm9P: Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela bibliography
• https://archive.is/EwQfT https://archive.is/Q2Mod: Responses to anticommunism
• Blood Lies by Grover Furr
• An article addressing the Polish Operation
• A list of commodity production by country. Some source for instance said that in the DPRK, 100% of products are sold to the state, whereas the figure for the USSR was around 70%. As part of an investigation on this, read about the C-M-C equation, like in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
• CIA black sites; Gina Haspel
• Marx Reloaded
• Why the BBC is not reliable: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/nov/14/bbc.research https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/orgreave-truth-police-miners-strike (doctored footage)
• https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-09-11-how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper/: The Guardian used to be reliable, but not as much now
• Why Michael Jackson, Disney stars grow up poorly. Related: K-pop, the profit motive, grooming the life of children for show
• Planned obsolescence: in light bulbs, how it saps labor and resources from other places where they are needed
• https://www.jpost.com/US-Elections/US-Jews-contribute-half-of-all-donations-to-the-Democratic-party-468774 And 25% to Republicans
• The rise of irony in capitalist culture. E.g. The Simpsons, which parodied wholesome shows. Was this largely because of neoliberalization?
• The real reason McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken
• Anatoly Chubais: "So what if 30 millions or whatever die out?"
• Strasserism: "We conceived and still conceive of National Socialism as a consciously anti-imperialist movement ..."
• Shorter working hours result in less heart attack risk
• Human shields in the form of POWs in cages are used by Syrian rebels according to their own media
• Feds encourage terror: https://twitter.com/BoltzmannBooty/status/1394796172255039488?s=20
• On Contradiction is very good for people who want to understand how Hegalian Dialectics relates to Marxism and Marxist theory but don't really have the interest or the philosophical aptitude to read Hegel's actual works
• Petrodollar started by Nixon, continued by Reagan: https://escholarship.org/content/qt9m52q2hk/qt9m52q2hk_noSplash_0dc61c20957c3164a5fb47d91e6748bd.pdf
• Philosophy: Why Theory episode called "Contradiction", and maybe the one on Kojeve on thesis/synthesis
• US farms overproduce and waste a lot, why? They get subsidies from government to destroy food to keep prices stable; also overproduction
• Tauger supposedly refuted: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20451398
• Being anti-violence ishypocritical for liberals. Violence is already enforced by enclosure of public land, police violence against minorities, strikers, peaceful protestors, even communal projects like OWS in Central Park. Also, forcing people to be on starving wages who earn more than what they get is tantamount to violence.
• An address to the observation that communist leaders were mostly from are mostly intelligentsia. They often got mass support from people, they gave up their position in old hierarchies, education gives them the advantage of being literate/connected/experienced in leadership enough
• Some missions never intended to be public: history.com/news/nixon-war-powers-act-vietnam-war-cambodia
• Explore the difference between the NEP and Deng's policies as well as Yugoslav, Hungarian market socialisms
• Grayzone: Exposing deceptive defectors
• https://web.archive.org/web/20200110173713/https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/state-sponsored-assassination/
• Trickle down economics: https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/markets/a-huge-study-of-20-years-of-global-wealth-demolishes-the-myth-of-trickle-down-and-shows-the-rich-are-taking-most-of-the-gains-for-themselves/ar-AARzGmw
• Legacy preferences in universities
• HRW collusion with the US: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-689307
• https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-anniversary-japan-atomic-bombs
• https://bdnews24.com/health/2022/01/02/when-they-warn-of-rare-disorders-these-prenatal-tests-are-usually-wrong: Silicon Valley making money from falsely telling parents their kids are defective
• https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
• Hexbear: a lefty-oriented Reddit-style site; most communities are anarchist
• Blanquist governments: Marmaduke Grove, Thomas Sankara, Qaddaffi, Abdul Nasser
• Clinton Foundation only actually donated 6%
• HRW is US-controlled but sometimes goes against the official US narrative?
• Judge rules Visa knowingly facilitated CP in PH
• Facebook admits takedowns on behalf of Israel
• Zuckerberg's response to being asked that if you don't like Facebook, where can you go?
• Comcast owns NBS/MSNBC, the merger with Time Warner needed government approval and Comcast is connected with it, hiring people in the gov who then back into corporate life. The revolving door.
• Marx's Fragment on Machines covers full automation

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) — Preceding unsigned comment added by capuch1n (talk • contribs)

I thought I would add my take on these. They are all good points and To-dos.

TL;DR: Maybe make a post on /meta/ asking for help with these issues, starting with the easiest fixes?

Thoughts

::1. Standard editing spacing. Doesn't seem high priority but if editors want it we can implement. I can adapt to whatever newline solution is picked but personally I edit with a newline before a header, and none after. == Header == vs. ==Header== doesn't bother me when editing source, but for the record, VE defaults to the first option. 2. Main Page style. My impression is that standard stylesheets are the way to go if you want things to scale well. I also have been thinking about adding mobile functionality; my understanding is that CSS would facilitate it. I don't know who put that MediaWiki thing there or why, but it should go unless someone says otherwise. 3. Merge Community Portal and Main Page. I say make front page more inviting and useful, but leave the Community Portal. The Portal is too busy and overwhelming for a front page, in my opinion. To my mind, Front should be for people who want to read or begin editing; Portal or similar space should exist for people who are ready to help and want direction. Maybe call it "editing portal" if you want. Front page should have links to useful shit, featured/"good" pages, maybe even news from /lp/ Newsanon? You know, like a real Wiki. Pictures too. 4. Periodic backups. Support 100%. Don't know how to implement. 7. Collapsible template for long quotes. If we implement this, it should be used only when absolutely necessary. Priority should lean towards shortening the damn quotes, paraphrasing when possible, and providing a reflink so people can go read the whole context. That's just my opinion. This site is supposed to make theory accessible, after all. But for the record, the template would take two seconds to make. 8. Copyleft license. I guess we should ask User:Jackbarn about this, since they raised the issue. 9. Domain hosting. wiki.leftypol.org was just intended to bring the old site back from the dead, right? I'm neutral one way or the other. I will say -- is maintaining a separate site more expensive or difficult? Maybe down the road. 10. SEO. I will look into how to do it. Do you have any starting ideas? 11. Fix VE. I don't know if we can edit the MW Visual Editor without a huge fuss. I'm truly sorry about that issue, and it definitely needs fixing. 6, 12. Header CSS; Dark theme. These are related to broader question of Skins. I suggest: Add dark mode skins and option button. Put the button in the actual interface/menu, at the top or left somewhere. Discuss default/main site skin. Decide if we wanna look fancy. Once default skin is added or decided against, change header and other CSS at MediaWiki:Common.css. Start with this Stackoverflow post. 5, 13. Spam filter; Filetypes. Per what Disc said in the Matrix... we need to ask a dev to disable the entire filter for now (manually moderate for spam in the interim) until we figure out what the issue actually is. Really what we need is a sympathetic dev, or someone who will nag the devs, lol. SVG seems like an easy starting request. 14. Put Pedia articles in /lp/ OPs. That would be amazing. First step: make a decent starter article. Next: post it in the general and gain the approval or interest of Anons. Then: only ask the devs to do it when there is real interest. My Ukraine article is actually intended for this.

Harrystein (talk) 18:30, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

NSFW/NSFL policy

I have added a graphic image to the WIP Anti-communism sidebar template. It seems to me to be appropriate for the topic as well as for the wiki. What should the policy on graphic images be? Do you approve of my choice of image? Harrystein (talk) 01:10, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

In my opinion, content on Leftypedia should not be censored so long as it is meaningful to the subject at hand. In the case of the image on the anti-communism sidebar, it accurately displays the nature of anti-communism (mass-killings, fascistic terror, etc.) and additionally blends in well with the black color on the border. SociusVenger (talk) 03:26, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Manual of Style: Anti-Semitism

Antisemitism or anti-Semitism? Antisemitic or anti-Semitic? Vote now on your phones. If you don't care, I will pick one. Harrystein (talk) 19:51, 14 October 2023 (UTC)