Hello, comrades. We have been developing a project for an encyclopedia with content moderated by Marxists-Leninists, not only due to demand for quality of information since bourgeois media and propaganda spread lies non-stop, but also because we need to understand reality around us if we wish to emancipate ourselves.

What has initially started as a project for shared knowledge, Wikipedia in a matter of a decade developed into an instrument of class domination and became increasingly aligned with bourgeois revisionist history.

Under the guise of “neutral point of view”, Wikipedia pretends to uphold a mythical neutrality, but in a class society there’s no such thing as neutrality. An example of this is the following excerpt, about Marxism-Leninism:

“Marxism–Leninism has been widely criticised, including by communists, anarchists and by democratic socialists. Many Marxist–Leninist states have been marked by totalitarianism, mass repressions and killings of political dissidents and social classes (so-called “enemies of the people”), religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, forced collectivisation and use of forced labor and concentration camps with Marxist-leninists being responsible for genocides and mass murders in Ukraine, China and Poland. Marxist-leninsm is discredited by most leftists schools of thought, including anarchism, socialism, council communism, and communalism as an absolute a form of totalitarian fascism. Marxist-Leninism is often described by leftists as an example of state capitalism, being contrary to the ideas of leftism.” (link)

Here, not only the article invokes the Hannah Arendtian troubled category of “totalitarianism” (see Domenico Losurdo’s analysis) the term “state capitalism” (term taken out of context from Lenin’s works), and even tries to imply fascism and communism are the same. We can easily see how reactionary Wikipedia has become.

That being said, I think most of us consider an alternative to Wikipedia an imperative on the areas of economy, political science and revolutionary theory. An alternative which not only acknowledges class society but upholds its end. I wanted to address a few things, questions that may arise:

Why not Leftypedia?

Leftypedia is a fantastic project and has had much success lately. In any case, we all hope it thrives as also an alternative to Wikipedia. Since we are working, in a sense, for the same goal, that being the spread of radical ideas, we are not competitors, we are already helping each other.

However, Leftypedia is not a project with the intention of being internationally available between languages. ProleWiki tries to fill that gap by offering support for international languages. While Leftypedia is offering some shared knowledge, they are reserved for United Statesian leftists.

And most importantly, while Marxists-Leninists are usually considered “leftists”, as Marxists, we disregard any type of political ideas not based on science and the study of the objective reality. We reject idealist inclinations and tendencies in our worldview, so Marxism-Leninism is mostly incompatible with leftist ideas, when it comes to taking action.

And what about ChinaWiki that comrades from Tankie Bunker were developing?

While most of us comrades have a profound admiration for China and its economic development, we think an encyclopedia that focus exclusively on China may end up losing a lot of opportunities to talk about other experiences and their contradictions.

However, for the Marxists-Leninists living in US, having a China Wiki is of extreme importance, and may be even more important than an international Marxist-Leninist wiki. For most comrades around the world, nevertheless, an international Marxist-Leninist encyclopedia is way more useful.*

How can I contribute?

There are many ways you can contribute, here are some:

• Writing or copying articles. There is currently no academic criteria for citation of sources, and you don’t need an account to edit articles, feel free to do it right away. Our encyclopedia is in need of quantity, not quality at the moment. You can write a stub, you can contribute with just a sentence in an existing article. One comrade writing an article may feel like a burden, but a hundred comrades writing parts of a bigger article will produce quality text in no time. You can also copy articles from other projects such as Leftypedia and Wikipedia. Just try to clean most of their liberalism before you publish it :winking face:
• Translations. ProleWiki’s content will benefit from having the same content translated over all languages. If reality is objective, we can always synthesize our ideas to get us closer to truth. We don’t need different texts for different languages. You can use Google Translate for this type of work, but I highly recommend DeepL’s translator.
• Web development. Comrade @camarada@lemmygrad.ml and I have been helping a lot with development of our website and of wiki functionalities. We have for instance a Visual Editor, which may be helpful for those who have trouble with wikitext formatting.
• Monetary contribution. Currently not available. Not only we live in a class society and are part of the lower class, but we also live in a market economy. Hosting websites has its expenses, and to keep this website up, we have to pay an yearly fee. We need to choose a donation platform (suggestions welcome) first to accept contributions, however. Once we’re ready, we will make our donations and expenses as transparent as possible.

But we have so much work to do!

Indeed. For us to develop a consistent and reliable source of accessible information, we have to contribute with a lot of work. We are well aware of this, these things may take time. However, small quantitative contributions may amount to big qualitative changes.

If you’re reading theory and learned something new, why not take some time to write a few sentences about what you’ve learned and share with your comrades in ProleWiki? Each one teach one!

Communication and organization

Individual action may have its benefits, but they’re always limited. So I’ve made a community in Lemmygrad reserved for the discussion related to our project, where we can offer suggestions, comment issues and solve contradictions when they arise.

Disclaimer: This is a very new project. Don’t expect much to work.

*Post-edit.