Today I was surprised to see that a Wikipedia article I recently created (Flags of the Makhnovshchina) was cited in the Anarchist Studies blog by Sean Patterson, best known for his book about the Makhnovists and Mennonites. The Wikipedia article itself is barely a month old and has already attracted a correction from Patterson for a section that incorrectly implied that the infamous skull-and-crossbones flag belonged to the Ukrainian People's Army, via a synthesis of sources, when it actually belonged to a completely different independent Ukrainian insurgent formation. (I have since corrected the article to reflect this)
Patterson's paragraph about Wikipedia's role in misinformation is almost damning:
In the digital era, Wikipedia has been especially important in tying the flag to Makhno in the broader public mind. Until very recently most related Wikipedia articles uncritically labelled the flag as Makhnovist. This has been corrected to some extent of late. For example, the entry “Flags of the Makhnovshchina” – created in June 2022 – correctly notes that the flag is not Makhnovist but incorrectly ascribes it to Symon Petliura’s Ukrainian People’s Army. In other entries and in the Wikimedia Commons the flag is still described as Makhnovist or “allegedly” Makhnovist. Given Wikipedia’s broad cultural reach, it is likely that the site acted as a significant vector in reinforcing the flag’s association with Makhno, particularly with online anarchist communities. As an open-source collaborative platform, Wikipedia is especially prone to such errors and the spreading of mythologies about under researched and highly politicized topics like the Makhnovist movement.
I wanted to bring this up here because I created this article partly in order to counter misinformation and didn't realize that some different misinformation had managed to make its way into the first edition of the article. I have also previously noted how misinformation about the Makhnovshchina has proliferated via Wikipedia, particularly with the erroneous sequential titling of the Makhnovist territory as a "Free Territory" (which I believe to be a mistranslation of a military descriptor a la "liberated zone") and as "Makhnovia" (a term used almost exclusively in Bolshevik historiography). These having been the titles for the Wikipedia article for extended periods of time means that they have made their way into the popular nomenclature. To this very day I still see people referring to the territory by these titles and (per Patterson) using the skull-and-crossbones flags as Makhnovist and anarchist symbols.
Obviously, with Wikipedia being a living and growing encyclopedia, errors like this can be (and have been) rectified. But what can't be rectified is the prior damage that historical inaccuracy and misinformation has done. While we have since corrected these articles, we can't correct the countless people that read those articles in those previous states and took away from them inaccurate information.
I'm bringing this up here not to criticise anyone but simply to reaffirm the importance of accuracy and hopefully have a discussion on how we can proceed with ensuring, to the best of our abilities, that we mitigate the damage that can be caused by misinformation. Grnrchst (talk) 09:52, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
@Grnrchst One way to proceed: email Sean Patterson and thank him. It's always nice to be told your work is being read by someone other than the twenty other people you talk to at conferences, but also it very clearly says "wikipedia editors actually care and you are helping them by talking about wikipedia," which is then self-reinforcing. -- asilvering (talk) 18:58, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
Points taken on Wikipedia's responsibility, full stop. But as far as citogenesis and astroturfing concepts into existence, there are some far more egregious examples in our space. For instance, many of our school of thought "isms" articles patch together lede paragraphs of related articles and thus give the impression that the topic is more robust/adopted than sources prove out. In the case of the Kotsur/Makhno flag, at least other archives had made the error before us (hanging in the Huliaipole museum?) and we abetted in its spread. With many other bisected anarchism flags, it's unclear what kind of currency these had outside of their Commons image descriptions claiming that a school of thought had adopted them as symbols.
I think there's an important difference between spreading misinformation and revising history, as the former implies neglect and fault. In this case, a historian is revising what appears to be previously reported erroneously. Since Wikipedia follows "verifiability, not truth", this is how it's supposed to work: you liberated a claim from a dusty old tome and a researcher followed the sources and corrected the record, so now we cite him. As a tertiary source, we're only as reliable as the sources we cite. While we have curatorial discretion, they're the fact-checkers, not us. Something very similar happened with Timothy Messer-Kruse and the Haymarket affair: [1][2].
If I may, something that I think has set our project apart on Wikipedia has been the number of our (y'all's) translations from other languages. Few other active projects I've seen have systematically translated from other languages—noteworthy histories and biographies that simply haven't had much coverage in the English language. They're harder to write for that reason but help undo a systemic bias both in our coverage and in general historiography. It's not so surprising that the flag would be conflated with Makhno when available English-language resources on Kotsur pale in comparison. Patterson's spelling of "Svyryd Kotsur" barely registers in search engines.
How did you find Patterson's article so fast? Do you have alerts on Makhno articles?
You know who would make a good reviewer on that Nestor Makhno (nom) GA nomination...? :) Think he would be interested if we invited him?
This has introduced a lot of new stuff to me, so thanks for responding as always!
I knew about citogenesis as a concept, but didn't know there was a word for it, nor that XKCD had written a comic about it. Aye there are definitely problems with many of the ideology articles under our care. I'd offer to help but I very intentionally avoid editing ideological articles, partly because I personally hate writing about theoretical concepts and partly because there's often talk page quibbles over this or that subjective interpretation that I just don't want to get into.
Yes, perhaps "misinformation" was the wrong word to use, I'm just often quite hard on myself about factual errors. Your point here is something I'm trying to convey in the email I'm drafting to Patterson. And I wasn't aware of the Haymarket affair debacle, I hope it has since been resolved to some degree and that we didn't leave Messer-Kruse with a lasting negative impression.
And yes, I'm definitely proud of the translation work we have been doing, especially if it counters systemic bias (another thing I want to bring up here at some point, but I'll set that aside for another day). There definitely is an issue with a focus on English language sources contributing to some oversight, so I'm forever grateful for historians like Patterson who go through the Russian language sources to clear things up like this.
I saw it pop up on the Anarchist Studies blog, through my RSS feed reader, and read it immediately after noticing the title. I don't have specific alerts for Makhnovist-related articles, but I'm more likely to click on them when I see them because that's just where my work is currently focused.
Not sure whether or not they'd be interested, I can only ask, but I hesitate to add even more work to a researcher's plate. :')
Messer-Kruse ended up writing two books on the Haymarket so I think it turned out okay for him. :) And nice—I've added the Anarchist Studies blog feed to my Zotero. czar15:25, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
@Grnrchst re: #5, if you're hesitant to ask him about doing specific work, you could link him to this wikiproject and let him know that there are editors here who would a) love to have him if he's ever interested in doing even minor edits and b) be able to help if he runs aground on any wikipedia policies. WP:OR in particular is very easy to step in by mistake but also, for historians at least, typically just as easy to avoid. -- asilvering (talk) 21:43, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
Hi there. I'm the author of the flag article you are discussing :-) I came across this thread when a friend told me the wiki article corrected the flag origin after I published my article. I wouldn't beat yourselves up about making mistakes. I make lots of them. It's very hard to be perfectly accurate. In fact your flags entry was a big improvement from what existed on Wikipedia before.
In fact, I've already noticed a critical mistake in my own article. I translated the flag's reverse (Naddniprians'kyi kish) as the "Lower Dnipro Division". This is not entirely correct. The prefix "nad" is closer to "over". Something more like "transdnipro". It is hard to translate into English but my rendition could cause confusion for Ukrainian speakers. Naddniprians'kyi refers to the Dnipro region on both sides of the river banks in general, excluding its lowest reaches around the Zaporizhia region. So it is probably best translated as simply as "Dnipro Division/Regiment", maybe with a footnote that clarifies the adjective naddniprians'kyi is referring to a historical-geographical region and that the prefix "nad" means "over". There is a good Ukrainian wiki entry about this term/region. Anyway, that's my contribution to spreading errors. I going to try and fix this translation error in the published article, but I thought I'd let you folks know too. My critiques of wikipedia aside, I actually believe in it as a project, one that is anarchistically inclined. It's great to see this specific wikiproject on anarchism. If you need any help on articles, I'd be happy to assist however I can. UnknownVolin (talk) 00:09, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
Thanks so much for responding! Recently I've fallen down the rabbit hole of Makhnovist research and have done a lot of work on articles related to the Makhnovshchina. So if you do want to help, another set of eyes on them would be amazing.
I'm very understanding of criticisms about Wikipedia, as someone very invested in building the project into something better, hence why I brought them up here. This WikiProject has been a fabulous space to be a part of and I'm glad to see it being treated with some enthusiasm.
Speaking of wikipedia accidentally creating facts, here's a real doozy from cn-wiki - a case of editing falsehoods into the wiki for a period of ten years: [3]. A reminder of one reason why ref-checking articles as you translate is very important... -- asilvering (talk) 00:31, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
The Russian and Ukrainian Wikipedia articles were made in 2012 and 2013 respectively, whereas the English language article was created as "Free Territory" in 2006. So it's more than likely that the Russian and Ukrainian articles were translating their titles from the English article.
None of my English language sources use the term "Free Territory" even once. My Russian language sources don't use the term "Вольная территория" either. How the original creator of this article came up with the term "Free Territory" is something I can't know, as they were blocked from editing a year after creating it. This is why I can only assume it was a mistranslation of military terms like "liberated territory" or something similar. Grnrchst (talk) 20:07, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
Oh dear, it really has spread to all of them, hasn't it. ja-wiki says it is "also called" Makhnovshchina, at least... es-wiki gives "Territorio Libre" and "Majnovia" but not Makhnovshchina. Ay. -- asilvering (talk) 07:17, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
It's partly correct (per Skirda 2004 p.2) but I'm not sure it's correct that Trotsky was the originator of the term. The suffix -shchina was used by a lot of different movements by various Ukrainian otamans, such as the Petliurshchina, Grigorievshchina, etc. The French Makhnovists even wrote a song titled "Makhnovshchina", so it wasn't entirely pejoratively used. Grnrchst (talk) 07:22, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
@GrnrchstSome comments on the suffix -щина. It does not have a precise meaning and is often difficult to translate into English. It is generally used in two instances: 1) Referring to the broad phenomenon of the noun it is attached to. Such as Petliurovshchina as you correctly pointed out. It can also be more abstract like Dedovshchina — the Russian military hazing system — or pokhabshchina — obscenity or smut in the media. It is usually employed with a negative or mocking connotation; 2) In older Russian and Ukrainian it was used to designate a geographic area (without any negative connotation). For example Naddniprianshchina meant something like "the general area of the lands on either side of the Dnipro River". Makhnovshchina roughly means "the phenomenon of the Makhno movement." As used by the Bolsheviks it had a distinct negative meaning, especially when placed into the context of other popular movements they designated as so-called "banditry" (Grigorievshchina or Antonovshchina). However, the term was also used by the Makhnovists themselves. For example, the main Makhnovist newspaper "Path to Freedom" published an article in June 1920 entitled "Anarchism and the Makhnovshchina." For them this was not a negative term but referred to the phenomenon and spirit of their movement. I don't know if Trotsky was the first to use it. That would be interesting to investigate. In foreign literature it is used synonymously with "Makhnovist movement" and doesn't carry the potential negative connotation. UnknownVolin (talk) 05:39, 9 July 2022 (UTC)
An important note brought up by Asilvering on translating pages: please, please, PLEASE, check sources. I've been chipping away at our Stubs and I've found that translating can be a rather labor intensive process. A lot of the articles in our custody rely on foreign, local media which are very susceptible to Link Rot. When I translated Federacja Anarchistyczna and Rafał Górski, half the work was fixing the dead-links and uncited info. I also got screwed when creating Delina Fico, since the Albanian page was just a blatant Copyvio, an issue that is apparently very pervasive on other language wikis. (Dealing with the fallout of that was a headache I'd prefer not to repeat. If you aren't already, please consider using Earwig Copyvio Detector). Some of these smaller Wikipedias permit citing other wikipedia articles, it can send you in circles just to end in a dead link. (My current record is 4 articles). I've found there's a correlation between Number of edits and citation quality.
Its still very heartening to see the activity and buzz this discussion is causing, makes me feel good about the project's future. I also know wayyy to much about flag design and misinformation creation now (Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents is a interesting {and funny} read). Etriusus (Talk)02:08, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
Aye, I'm glad this post has generated such discussion, it's great to see. I wonder if it may be worth adding the "Free Territory" debacle to the list of citogenesis incidents. Grnrchst (talk) 13:43, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
Not a bad idea, I've probably spent more time researching this single citogenesis incident than most people have spent even thinking about the Makhnovist movement... Grnrchst (talk) 11:00, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
It would appear this fabricated term is going to continue getting added to the article.[4] I know from experience that some people are very attached to the "Free Territory". Am wondering whether it may be useful to add it to the "Etymology and orthography" section, with a note about it being a case of circular reporting and originating on English Wikipedia, because it's obviously made its way into the popular zeitgeist. (Although I think it being added to the lead or infobox is unacceptable, given its origins in citogenesis.) Grnrchst (talk) 09:25, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
Incredible to see people adding it back to the article in direct response to your edit summary that identifies the term as citogenesis! -- asilvering (talk) 12:23, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
@Asilvering If you want to see something fun in this vein, check out the Taraskevica wiki for Belarus, it is entirely simply a oppostion propaganda outfit. Gave me a laugh at least. SP00KYtalk19:39, 23 July 2022 (UTC)
Highly related: Zhemao hoaxes – a decade-long hoax on the Chinese Wikipedia about Russian history, perpetuated mainly by taking advantage of editor good faith that obscure Russian-language sources said what they said. We have the same issue in our articles translated from Russian. It's nigh impossible for us to know whether the information is accurate both because of the language barrier/inadequacy of translation tools and the inaccessibility of the offline sources (not to mention the imported Russian sources that need us to add specific page numbers within a book). Even with the means to interlibrary loan Russian-language text, the process of transcribing Cyrillic script, cleaning up a machine translation, and citing accurately within a Wikipedia article becomes a multi-hour affair for a single sentence's citation. After the Seigenthaler incident, the English WP's rules on biographies of living people got tighter. I would think the same should happen for verification of obscure sources after the Zhemao hoaxes. czar06:52, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
Yes, this is the one I posted above - thank you so much for drawing up an entire article on it. I have observed that many ru-wiki articles are based on user-generated sources, as well. I would greatly like to see tighter guidelines for obscure sources and inter-wiki translations. But even the "a bad machine translation is worse than no translation at all" guideline doesn't stick at AfD for example, so I'm not sure how one could word an RfC about this or where it could possibly go. See for example this recent AfD, [5], which closed as Keep, despite being part of this whole problem. That's not quite the same issue as "obscure non-English print sources of questionable veracity", but I do think it's pretty strongly linked. -- asilvering (talk) 18:21, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
I think it would definitely be worth having a wider discussion about this issue outside of the WikiProject, but I'm also unsure how we would word a RfC. Grnrchst (talk) 13:46, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
Splitting out a dedicated section for the "Free Territory" translation issue mentioned above. Rules vary between each language version of Wikipedia as to who can directly rename pages, but almost always someone can suggest a rename. For example, I did so for eswp at w:es:Discusión:Territorio Libre with their local version of Template:Requested move (Q6004220) (see the list) with this text. czar03:05, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
Another possible example of citogenesis is the term "Black Army" (referring to the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine), which I have seen used in various places online and is now even the title for the Spanish Wikipedia article es:Ejército Negro. Trouble is, I haven't found any sources calling it a "Black Army" anywhere.
It may well have been used, as the Black Guards certainly used the colour theme, but it currently seems to me like this may be an anachronistic way of placing the Insurgent Army alongside the coloured themes of "Red Army", "White Army", etc. Does anyone know of any sources that call it the "Black Army"? If not, I'm leaning towards removing the term from the article. Grnrchst (talk) 10:15, 11 July 2022 (UTC)
Ok thanks! The fact that Victor Serge used the term "Black Army" in the 1930s and 40s means that there is some historical weight to the term "Black Army", so I won't remove it. As for Collins' piece, it was written in 2020, so most likely fell victim to citogenesis from Wikipedia. Grnrchst (talk) 07:47, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
I have painstakingly gone through all the articles that linked to "Free Territory" and corrected them to "Makhnovshchina". Now the question left is what to do with the remaining redirect, so I opened a discussion on the disambiguation talk page, as I think the DAB article has a better claim to the title than a redirect for the Makhnovshchina. Whether or not to continue including the Makhnovshchina within the DAB article is still up for discussion, as unfortunately citogenesis has firmly established a link between the two. Grnrchst (talk) 15:54, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
Медведева's «Революция и Гражданская война в России 1917—1922» ISBN9785969114944
Кубанина's «Махновщина. Крестьянское движение в степной Украине в годы Гражданской войны» ISBN9785227075031
Those appear to be 2018 and 2017 texts, so there is an argument to be made that those are citogenesis. czar02:23, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
@Czar@GrnrchstRoy Medvedev is the author of the first text listed. He was born in the Georgian SSR and was a dissident writer in 60s who mainly wrote criticisms of Stalinism. The book listed is a collection of his writings. I don't know what year he mentions the term "Free Territory" but it would certainly not be contemporaneous to the Makhnovists.
The second book is a different case. Kubanin's text was first published in 1926 and even provoked a pamphlet-long riposte from Makhno himself. It is a very important early Soviet study of the Makhnovshchina. I searched the book for the term "вольная территория" and found nothing. I only found the term in the book description for its 2017 reissue. From what I can determine "free territory" was employed by the most recent publishers but not in the text itself.
I don't know the term's exact origins but I don't remember seeing it in any primary sources. The same goes for the term "Black Army". I've never seen it used by the Makhnovists themselves during the civil war. UnknownVolin (talk) 07:15, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
Hrm, the plot thickens. I went through the Medvedev book and found one solitary reference to an "вольная анархистская территория" ("free anarchist territory") on page 163, mentioned only in passing, with nothing else even vaguely resembling the same wording. This "free anarchist territory" isn't even referenced in the main section about the Makhnovists (pp. 387-388), which focuses on the Bolshevik-Makhnovist conflict that broke out following the siege of Perekop (a time when the Makhnovists no longer held definitive control over any territory). The Makhnovists largely go by unmentioned throughout the book, with one section covering their history briefly in broad strokes.
It's hard to say for certain whether or not this is another example of citogenesis, per UV's above comments. But whatever it is, it certainly isn't enough to call "Free Territory" a common name for the Makhnovist-held areas. Grnrchst (talk) 09:58, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
@Grnrchst@CzarI double-checked Shanin and Danilov's massive Makhnovist document collection. There is no mention of "free territory" or a "Huliaipole Republic" in almost 1000 pages of archival documents. The only mention of "republic" in relation to the Makhnovists comes from Trotsky who called their territory the "Guliai-polian independent anarcho-republic". This was in the context of calling for the Makhnovists' liquidation. Separate from this collection the Bolshevik Kubanin mentions the failed attempt to create a "Makhnovist republic." In their introduction, Shanin and Danilov choose to refer to the territory controlled by Makhno as "Makhnovia". However, this term appears only once in the documents from a Bolshevik report dated Sept. 22, 1919. It simply opens "From Makhnovia (A comrade's message)." I couldn't find any references to "Black Army."
The term "Makhnograd" is mentioned in N. Sukhogorskaia's memoirs from the 1920s. She was an eyewitness in Huliaipole and says the town was often called "Makhnograd" when it was occupied by Makhno. The Mennonite author Dietrich Neufeld also refers to Huliaipole as Makhnograd in his diary published in 1921 and the civil war journalist Harold Williams refers to Huliaipole as having been "renamed" Makhnograd. So this term is historically grounded but refers specifically to the town of Huliaipole.
I think the biggest issue here is that the RIAU did not see themselves as establishing a "government" or formalized territory, but rather as clearing space and giving its inhabitants the opportunity to construct a free society. Therefore, any official name would have to emerge from the people and not the army. This stands in stark contrast to Petliura who was trying establish the Ukrainian People's Republic or the Bolsheviks with their Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Makhnovists did think in these terms and did not dictate a territorial name. UnknownVolin (talk) 21:37, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
@Grnrchst@Czar A couple more notes. Skirda writes that both "Makhnovia" and "Makhnograd" were Bolshevik terms. I'm not convinced that is true for the latter but worth noting. As mentioned Viktor Serge uses the term "Black Army." His earliest use of the term I could find is from a couple pieces written in 1938 ["Once More-Kronstadt" and "Anarchist Thought"] The term also pops up in the famous French song La Makhnovtschina, which as far as I can tell was written by Étienne Roda-Gil in the 60s. UnknownVolin (talk) 04:50, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
Viktor Belash in his Dorogi Nestora Makhno uses "Makhnograd" once and refers to "Makhnovia" three times, one time in a quote from Trotsky. But this source is problematic. It is based on a 1930 manuscript found by Belash's son in the archives and published in 1993. However, Belash's son openly admits that he added his own material to the published version. The original manuscript is now lost and it is nearly impossible to disentangle Belash from his son's edits. So there is a question of whether these terms were inserted or in the original. UnknownVolin (talk) 08:40, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
@GrnrchstI found an interesting term in Shanin and Danilov's collection. In a leaflet from 1919 entitled "What are the Makhnovists Fighting For?" [p. 290-291] the author calls Makhnovist territory the "South-Ukrainian Powerless [безвластной] Labour Federation." Powerless in this context doesn't mean weak but was a term used to describe a system of radical grassroots social organization devoid of centralized state authority. This is the only time I've seen a formal title attributed to Makhnovist territory. Although imo the leaflet reads as though it was written by someone outside the movement commenting on it. To what extent this term was actually used at the time is hard to say. UnknownVolin (talk) 19:46, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for helping look into this! I actually already heard about this "South Ukrainian Labour Federation" from a UATV documentary [4:30 mark], but hadn't seen it in any written sources yet. I'll need to look into this further.
As for a de jure term for the territory that I've found in my own research, the closest example was mentioned by Colin Darch (2020) [p. 108] as "Autonomous Republic of Free Soviets", which was apparently the name they used during their political-military pact with the Bolsheviks in October 1920. Darch attributed this to Chop & Lyman (2017) [p. 10]. Grnrchst (talk) 11:06, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
@GrnrchstI can check the Chop/Lyman source. Here is what Chop says in his 2002 dissertation:
With regard to the self-naming of the Makhnovist political formation, certain problems arise. First and foremost, the political leadership of the movement feared that the use of a name would imply the existence of a state on the territory they controlled. To that end, all negotiations carried on by them were in the name of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovists). But among the broad masses the irreverent name "Makhnovia" spread, even though Makhno himself never used it. He used the name "Territory of Zaporozhia and Priazovia," but it didn't stick. There were other names that were used unofficially by the Makhnovists: "the Gulyaipolsky Republic" (in our opinion the most neutral), "the Free Territory," "the Gulyaipolsky Territory," "the Insurgent Territory," "Priazovia," "the Free Fatherland of Anarchy," and a few others.
Huh, interesting to see him use "Free Territory" in 2002. That's 4 years before the citogenesis occurred. I am very confused right now... Grnrchst (talk) 07:29, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
@Grnrchst@Czar Unfortunately, Chop gives no references for that paragraph. It's definitely more than 19 pp. The worldcat link I believe is to an article of the same name he published. UnknownVolin (talk) 19:41, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. Now I understand the 19 p. worldcat description. This is just the abstract of the dissertation. Kind of like like a large introductory summary. The actual dissertation is much larger. UnknownVolin (talk) 04:12, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
@Grnrchst@Czar I checked the Chop/Lyman source. They say there was something called the "Autonomous Republic of Free Soviets" planned since 1919. The citation given is another secondary source of questionable value: Vitalii Oppokov, Лев Задов: смерть от бескорыстия (Petrozavodsk: Rudi-Bars, 1994). I can't find a copy of it but it is listed as fiction on some sites. UnknownVolin (talk) 20:29, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Damn, this is getting wild. Should I remove the reference to an "Autonomous Republic of Free Soviets" in the Makhnovshchina article? Given that it appears to be sourced from a fiction book, it feels like I probably should... Grnrchst (talk) 07:51, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
@UnknownVolin@Grnrchst, it is useful for our own clarity to understand the proper name for the occupied land but to the underlying question, I'd just like to confirm whether the following logic is sound: My understanding is that the notable topic here, for purposes of the encyclopedia, is less the territory than the sociopolitical activity in the occupied territory. I.e., an article on "Free Territory" or "Makhnovia" means that the article covers the concept like a state, whereas articles re-scoped as "Makhnovshchina" become more about the movement associated with Makhno in the territory and less about the geopolitical borders. Is that the proper framing for purposes of the encyclopedia based on how it's covered in the sources? czar12:24, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
I would say aye to it being about the movement. The idea of there being a fixed, consistent, Makhnovist polity isn't even really a thing either, as the Makhnovshchina only really held control of a large territory for a few months at a time. "Makhnovshchina" as a term for this article is useful because it can refer to both the movement and the territory, due to the ambiguity of the -shchina suffix. But at the end of the day, it's best to conceive of it as a fluid, dynamic movement, changing constantly due to the circumstances of the war, rather than as a rigid state form. Grnrchst (talk) 14:40, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
@Czar@GrnrchstI agree with Grnrchst's comments. The concept of a territorial state was foreign to the movement. Makhnovshchina is a broad enough term to include notions of occupied territory which their activities occurred. UnknownVolin (talk) 19:59, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Hm. No activity in two weeks on the es and uk Wikipedia rename discussions. I might just continue with other Wikipedia renames if this is uncontroversial. czar05:49, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
Keep in mind transliteration issues: In the Spanish language, "Makhno" is written as "Majnó", so "Makhnovshchina" would also be transliterated as "Majnóvshchina". This also raises the issue of the Spanish Wikipedia having an article titled "Revolución majnovista" (with an AKA "Majnóvshchina" in the lead), which is a far more developed article than the one titled "Territorio libre". Grnrchst (talk) 13:31, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
@Grnrchst, hm, I'm not seeing many sources use the phrase "Majnóvshchina" by search. Is the term you see in Espanol/Spanish sources, more often than "Makhnovshchina"? czar19:10, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
From what I can see, while "Makhnovshchina" does sometimes occur in sources translated into Spanish, I mostly see "Majnovchina" (dropping the sh)[9], "Majnóvshina" (dropping the ch and the accent) and "Majnóvschina"[10] (dropping the first h)[11] in Spanish language sources. Transliterating the Cyrllic Щ can be tricky in any language, but generally the Cyrillic Х should be transliterated into J for Spanish.
Just seen that the Spanish Wikipedia article uses the version "Majnóvschina", so I would probably give preference to this one. "Majnovchina" gets more hits on Google books but I have problems with the straight "ch" by itself, as that's more closely transliterated from the Cyrllic Ч, rather than the Щ. Grnrchst (talk) 19:40, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
Okay! After much ado, the bulk have been addressed but I could use some help monitoring the outstanding discussions. czar04:14, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
It seems like you're getting some pushback from other language Wikipedians over this. Please do try to take care with these proposals. While I want to ensure this issue is rectified, I don't want to us to be badgering Wikipedians in languages we don't speak via machine translation, especially if their projects have their own policies on moving articles. We're not going to get far if people see this as the English Wikipedia attempting to enforce its own changes on others. I'm trying to stick to providing facts and clarification, as I think the final decision on this needs to be made by them, not us, even if we disagree. Grnrchst (talk) 11:23, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
For the Swedish discussion, the issue is that the language simply doesn't have a known cognate for "Makhnovshchina" so they'll need to figure out what that is. Certainly that is a better result than never reaching out to them. To my knowledge, I haven't done anything afoul of any language's policy and have followed their help pages to move pages properly. In this case, they just objected to the lack of a cognate. In some discussions in other languages, they are skeptical of the evidence. It's their prerogative and agreed, of course, that the decision is ultimately theirs. czar13:14, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
I think we can wrap up this thread. Dozens of hours in and most of the work finished last month: With the exception of the Ukrainian and Russian Wikipedia discussions linked above, most of the former "Free Territory" articles on other language Wikipedias have been addressed (either with a new title or rescoped). Frankly, I'm baffled at how long the Ukrainian and Russian discussions are taking, but as an interloper to those projects it's their prerogative if they want to keep low-traffic discussions open for over a month. Anyone interested can continue to follow those discussions, but I'd say our work on this issue is done. For anyone so inclined, you can go into the other language Makhnovshchina (Q1436243) articles above and check their incoming links to correct inaccurate (i.e., "Free Territory" cognate) redirect terms, but since that's onerous and likely to raise grammatical issues in languages unfamiliar to us, might be best to let those be. czar01:48, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
Running from October 1 to 31, 2022, WikiProject Women in Green (WiG) is hosting a Good Article (GA) editathon event – Wildcard Edition! Participants are invited to work on nominating and/or reviewing GA submissions related to any and all women and women's works during the event period. Want to improve an article about a Bollywood actress? Go for it. A pioneering female scientist? Absolutely. An award-winning autobiography by a woman? Yes! GA resources and one-on-one support will be provided by experienced GA editors, and participants will have the opportunity to receive a special WiG barnstar for their efforts.
Contributing to this editathon sounds like a great idea!
Does anybody know of any articles like this that we have in our care that meet or are close to meeting GA criteria? It might be a good time for us to focus on some of our own vital articles about women, including those for Voltairine de Cleyre, Dorothy Day, Louise Michel, Lucy Parsons and Simone Weil.
In my own time editing articles about the Makhnovshchina, the two women I came across that I expanded the articles for were Halyna Kuzmenko and Maria Nikiforova. Could someone have a wee look over these and see if they would be worth submitting for this? Main problems with them that I know of are: for Kuzmenko, the "Education" and "Controversy" sections still need a go over; for Nikiforova, it relies largely on a single source.
re: Kuzmenko and Nikiforova, on skim and minding the caveats you mentioned, they look substantive—just need longer lede sections. Let me know if you'd like a copy edit.
re: other articles close to the criteria, our "B-class" articles is a good list. Some to consider:
Olive Dehn( talk | history | ) – Poet and children's writer – Poet and children's writer
Itō Noe( talk | history | ) – Japanese editor and activist (1895–1923) – Japanese editor and activist (1895–1923)
Dora Marsden( talk | history | ) – English suffragette and editor (1882–1960) – English suffragette and editor (1882–1960)
Helene Minkin( talk | history | ) – Russian-Jewish anarchist (1873–1954) – Russian-Jewish anarchist (1873–1954)
Mujeres Libres( talk | history | ) – Anarchist women's organization in Spain – Anarchist women's organization in Spain
Kanno Sugako( talk | history | ) – Japanese anarcha-feminist journalist (1881–1911) – Japanese anarcha-feminist journalist (1881–1911)
I have a few others that I've started over the years that I can potentially spruce up too. I have stockpiled biographies on the above vital article topics as well, but realistically those will take me longer than a month to write nevertheless review. czar06:43, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
Ok, I've gone over those sections and expanded the leads for both articles, so if you're up for copyediting them, that'd be very much appreciated.
I'm also going through some of the above-mentioned B-class articles, in order to see which we can get promoted. I've standardised the citations for Kanno Sugako and am already eyeing up some of the "Women in [...]" articles (which I didn't know about before this, so thanks for linking them!) -- Grnrchst (talk) 17:41, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
I've been underwater with new-term stuff but I'll see what I can do about Women in the Paris Commune. I think Federated Legion of Women is much closer, and would be easier to get up to snuff as it is shorter. There is also Adélaïde Valentin (FA on fr-wiki), but that's worse off than the one on the Legion. All three were translated from French during a WiR editathon earlier this year, and while the references have been checked, technically speaking, all three are pretty significant not-exactly-citogenesis concerns for me. I've noticed fr-wiki articles on these topics are frequently unclear about when they slide from "reporting on historical 'fact'" to "reporting on a historian's interpretation" (partly a product of the typical rhetorical mode of French-language academic history-writing vs English-language academic history-writing, and so, more a problem when translated directly to English), contain dated scholarship or inaccurate feminist claims, and/or set off my historian alarm bells for other reasons. Not "this should be immediately removed from wp"-level issues but certainly "anyone looking to nominate these should find some confidence-inspiring recent research first"-level ones. -- asilvering (talk) 22:16, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
Cleanup drive
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. Updates on reimplementing the Graph extension, which will be known as the Chart extension, can be found on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Five years ago, I worked to whittle our articles tagged for cleanup down to near zero. It has crept back up to 989 issues across 522 articles (28% of pages within the project). I'm planning to whittle it down again but since there are a lot more of us now, wanted to extend an open invite for anyone who cares to join me in resolving cleanup tags.
The biggest challenge (read: most time-intensive) are the articles tagged for expansion, for those with a big appetite. Otherwise there are plenty of low-hanging fruit in this list for editors new and old, from fixing straightforward referencing errors to adding citations for unsourced info. Any interest? czar08:27, 24 July 2021 (UTC)
Damn, this is quite the hefty list we have going on here. I'll be sure to pay attention to it and attempt to help whittle it back down. I've recently been focused on anarchist movements by region, so I will be more than happy to take on the more intensive tasks in that area of the project.--Grnrchst (talk) 21:12, 24 July 2021 (UTC)
I just used citation bot to go over the CS1 errors. A number of the articles didn't see any changes, so when the list refreshes on Tuesday I'll see which articles need manual fixing.--Grnrchst (talk) 12:48, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
Awesome stuff! By the way, are there any tools that I can use to aid any cleanup efforts I undertake? I'm struggling to see where a lot of the errors are when I look up the articles in question. Cheers. --Grnrchst (talk) 17:42, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
@Grnrchst, yes! Do you have "show hidden categories" turned on? Most cleanup templates populate a hidden category, which is what feeds the weekly report. When I can't find the issue in a huge article, I usually start with the categories to identify the relevant cleanup templates within the article. Sometimes those categories also offer advice on tools to resolve the issue.
I think that was a good call, since that template was not really functioning as a maintenance category. Those articles are better saved for a stub drive. Here's a list we can use if we want, generated using PetScan at the union of the foreign-language translation category (which the {{expand language}} template still populates) and the talk page WikiProject template. NB: it takes a few minutes to load. czar03:21, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
Great work everyone! I have the RIAU tag on my to-do list: the article will probably be a fair bit shorter and quite restructured by the time I'm done with it. I'll take a stab at any others I see that I think I can sort. Grnrchst (talk) 19:34, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
Recent literature (2022)
I thought I'd start a thread with new book and journal article releases that would be of interest to this noticeboard/project. Feel free to add! czar04:27, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
Budraĭtskis, Ilya (January 2022). Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia. Translated by Vivaldi, Giuliano. Brooklyn: Verso Books. ISBN978-1-83976-420-2. – Publisher
Frayne, Carl Tobias (January 2022). Individualist Anarchism in France and Its Legacy (Ph.D.). University of Cambridge. doi:10.17863/CAM.80240. – embargoed until Jan 2023
Lause, Mark A. (January 2022). Soldiers of Revolution: The Franco-Prussian Conflict and the Paris Commune. New York: Verso Books. ISBN978-1-78873-057-0.
Löwy, Michael; Besancenot, Olivier (2022). Revolutionary Affinities: Toward a Marxist Anarchist Solidarity. Translated by Campbell, David. Oakland: PM Press. ISBN978-1-62963-969-7.
Maglione, Giuseppe (January 2022). "Anarchism Mainstreamed? On Recent Trends, Challenges and Opportunities in Anarchist Scholarship". Contemporary Political Theory. doi:10.1057/s41296-021-00532-7. ISSN1476-9336.
Stevenson, Nick (January 2022). "New Left, Anarchism and Education". In Maisuria, Alpesh (ed.). Encyclopedia of Marxism and Education. Vol. 3. Brill. pp. 501–516. doi:10.1163/9789004505612_031. ISBN978-90-04-50561-2.
Stewart, Jon (October 2021). "Bakunin's Theory of Anarchy". Hegel's Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 229–257. doi:10.1017/9781009019828.011. ISBN978-1-316-51998-1.
Vuilleumier, Marc (January 2022). La Suisse et la Commune de Paris, 1870–1871 (in French). Éditions d'en bas. ISBN978-2-8290-0638-8. – Publisher
Williams, Kristian (June 2022). Gang Politics: Revolution, Repression, and Crime. Chico: AK Press. ISBN978-1-84935-456-1.
Yeoman, James Michael (September 2022). Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915. Chico: AK Press. ISBN978-1-84935-458-5.
Zimmer, Kenyon; Torres, Anna Elena, eds. (2022). Freedom's Fullness: Histories of Jewish Anarchism. University of Illinois Press. – forthcoming
Hey all. I'm looking to lay the groundwork for the future expansion and improvement of our vital articles. Right now, this mostly consists of finding reliable sources that can be added to the articles' bibliography and further reading sections. Thought I'd bring this up here, in case any of you know of sources that can be used for these articles. If you do, feel free to drop them here or put them in the articles themselves. Cheers. -- Grnrchst (talk) 12:17, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Nice! I've added a bunch over the years but if there are any in particular that pose difficulties, perhaps call them out here and we can help add sources. I figure that when someone eventually decides to work on an article, they're likely starting with their own source discovery search anyway. czar05:22, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
Hello, I am an editor of lusophone wikipedia, and I have been thinking about this idea of creating some spaces of coordination between the WikiProjects of Anarchism in other instances of Wikimedia. As we now, not all projects enjoy much activity and disponibility of editors, and some are quite demobilized now, with the lusophone wiki being an example, despite my effort and some casual editors. I think that Wikimedia has developed some nice tools to scale up the coordination capacity between editors across various languages, such as meta.wikimedia and Wikidata, as well as some highly experimental places, such as Wikispore. And it may be a good time to experiment how we can use these spaces potentialize our individual efforts and also initiate some entirely new possibilities, such as the ones we see being test with Wikidata. Along with that, these spaces could provide a plataform to informe ourselves of more international perspectives of anarchist history and movement, and elaborate new efforts of outreach to the growing academic and non-academic networks of anarchist studies.
Some things, like for example this nice thread of recent literature, could be mantained there and then transcluded to here and other projects. Wikispore could provide the freedom to cultivate these possibilities, given its nature. Some WikiProjects already develop an analogue coordination, and we could push it even further. Bye! JoaquimCebuano (talk) 01:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
@JoaquimCebuano: This is a fantastic idea! It's something I've been thinking about for a while now, along the lines of assisting each other with translations and such. To be honest, I have no idea how any of the tools that you've mentioned work, but would happily help contribute if I figure out how. -- Grnrchst (talk) 15:38, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
I think we can start looking for some examples of coordination between WikiProjects. The philosophy WikiProject has a page in Wikidata where they seek to revise the creation and manipulation of itens related to the discipline in the same way as we do in each wikipedia, at the same time they make an effort to propose new properties specific to the subject to be used in itens, so as to develop a greater expressivity in the whole structured data system, and also they develop code's to query the information acumulated in wikidata, creating visualization or facilitating the effort of revision.
Another example (this one i just found out now) is the Egyptology wikiproject in the meta.wiki, they basically organize a general instance to all the local projects in egyptology, using much of the same structures as we use here, but they also provide some information on the creating of new projects in each wiki, as well as task specific coordination, which seems to cover pictures, 'Hieroglyphs editor', 'Gods' names' and translation efforts.
These two may give an image of what strategy of coordination we can chose. I personally would propose the creation of a page in Wikispore, which is a very open and experimental community, where we could start to organize our ideas and also reach editors in each wiki, inviting them to participate.
Some areas of coordination could include:
Bibliography of anarchist studies - Bibliography is a highly valuable element of research, configuring along with the encyclopedia itself a kind of tertiary source, and, i dont know about you, but the dificult to find bibliographies on anarchist was huge when i began to study about the subject, especially when you are looking for some specialized topics, such as anarchist economics and political ecology. So, we could start to translate this Recent literature thread in wikidata itens to be organized under the class of Anarchist studies and visualized with some kind of wikidata query that would be automatically updated, this would also make easier the process of translation and transmission of content, since wikidata itens can be used as references in wiki articles, without the need of local formatting. - Template:Cite Q
Outreach - By organizing the project at such global level, harnessing the most that these tools of structured data can offer, we could strenght our case for more participation of people already engage in networks of anarchists studies, in museums, archives, and institutions in general. They could provide visual material and collections of documents in general to be put open access, and used here and other projects. Also, such support could potentialize possible events and edit-a-thon's
Creatin of new project - In the same vein as the egyptology project that i linked, we could assist in the creation of new local projects, by provinding instructions, support, organizing some kind of 'core articles' and so on.
Expanding our internationalist perspective - Finally, one of the central motivations for this idea, for my, is to find better ways to network information with the intention of reducing gaps, missed topics and events of the history and theory of anarchism. The scale of this movement always surpass our understanding of it, with histories and people that remain unknown for the most part, because of language barries, weak institutional support for scholarship, and also the persecution and supression of anarchism. As a coordination project, we could find methods to open our perspective beyond particular contexts with editors provinding clues on how, for example, anarchist philosophy might have a growing body of writing and ideas outside europe and north america, and then move to integrate these information in the local wiki's.
These are some of my ideas, and i think it might resonate with every editor here. I reaffirm the proposal to create a page in Wikispore where we can better organize and coordinate the start of the project. Wikispore work much like Wikipedia, so it wont be a technical problem for most people. The ideas related to Wikidata would require a more sophisticated technical knowledge, since it mobilizes some competence in Wikidata Query Service and the Lua programming language, used in mediawiki to create modules for all sort of things we use daily, such as templates. I have been studying, and i think that some working knowledge isnt hard to achieve, some few editors could act as the 'technical team' translating these ideas. JoaquimCebuano (talk) 19:14, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
I'd never seen Cite Q before! It looks very useful, but it also appears that its use is discouraged on en-wiki. I'm happy to help maintain a wikidata-based bibliography in any case. Regarding helping each other with translations, I think it would be very useful even just to have a list of editors and their translation languages. -- asilvering (talk) 23:00, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
I would say that Cite Q works pretty well nowadays, i have used it in some instances. The advantage is that, despite the fact that it demands more works to inscribe a new reference, it has this versatility to be used forever in the future by any editor, and also the possibility to reorganize the sources in other modalities. For example, after adding a good amount of sources on anarchist economics, we could develop a code to generate a automatic list of bibliography of the subject, that could be used in any wiki and also other websites.
And yes, a translation network would be really helpful, we could even map anarchism related itens in wikidata that exist only in one wiki, to create a list of less known topic and people. JoaquimCebuano (talk) 23:16, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
WP:@ Social Media bots
Hey! I would like to run some bots that regularly posts data to Twitter and Mastodon/Plefora that post things like the top edited page of the week, updates about the creation of new discussions on the talk page, AfD's and other often brigaded policy stuff like that. It's something I am happy to design and run myself but would like suggestions, advice and so on from users of the WP:@ Space. The goals are to increase activity here and open up what's going on to the wider public. SP00KYtalk19:33, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
This sounds so cool. I guess another thing to include could be promotions to GA/FA, just so we can show off our best work, but I can't think of much else. Go for it pal! :D -- Grnrchst (talk) 21:46, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Neat idea and potentially a big project! I'd add that I think a lot of that data would be helpful to post to this talk page as well. A few ideas: (1) Portal:Anarchism, to my understanding, is morbund, but still has stuff like "in this day..." anniversaries and DYKs. This bot could be a better use case for that info than the Portal itself. (2) Posting discussion links "for your information" is useful, but if it targets contentious discussions with any intent (misconstrued or not) of brigading discussions, worth caution per our canvassing guidelines. (3) What's more interesting to me than top-edited pages is expansions. When someone expands a stub at least 5x in size and the edits hold for several days without being reverted, it'd be nice to send some acknowledgement/encouragement/appreciation, but those articles tend to sit in obscurity. Double-edged sword, as I imagine some won't want the reversions or disputes that come with attention, but overall I think those types of alerts would be more boon than burden. (And, again, would be great to have on-wiki as well.) (4) Surges in page views would be interesting as well, though WP:@/PP only updates once per month, so would likely need another way. (5) Other WikiProjects would likely be very interested in this as well. czar01:50, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
I read today that Twitter are closing it's API's for this kind of thing which is very frustrating and adds a whole bunch of work when otherwise APIs for at least the comms meaning all I needed on that end was some simple python was a big point in the favour of doing this. Maybe it will just take more work and time though, Twitter is generally all over the place I have seen from the news, so who knows what's going on. All good ideas I love Czar. :) Can definitely attest to that sometimes not having the attention is for the best though, especially with all the recent drama on the Cospito article so maybe i'll re-think a little in that area too... I hope for the best, we will see! x. SP00KYtalk14:36, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
Systemic bias report
Hi everyone. For some time I've been interested in helping counter systemic bias within the WikiProject and Wikipedia more generally. Recently I decided it would be a good idea to do a quantitative report about systemic bias in the project, in order for us to best figure out how to move forward with improving our project's coverage. Today I finished my report, which you can read at Wikipedia:WikiProject Anarchism/Systemic bias report February 2023. I would be delighted to hear your thoughts. Regards. -- Grnrchst (talk) 19:35, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
This was great, thank you for doing this! IDK if it is helpful but we are currently working towards a MENA+ anarchist library which may be at least slightly useful in future endeavours rectifying coverage of certain regions. Another comment I make would be in the region of Iraq and Syria for example a lot of the Anarchism related content often only revolves around Apoist politics and the Rojava experiment. SP00KYtalk01:38, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Is AFAQ an RS?
In my recent run through the ideology articles covered by the project, I noticed a lot of them used Iain McKay's Anarchist FAQ. I made the decision to cut it in a number of cases, as I recalled that previous discussions about it suggested it might be questionable as a source, and there weren't many cases where it was cited to information that couldn't be drawn from a more clearly reliable source. But I'm bringing this up now because I saw that @Centralia1 has recently used it as a source for certain authoritative-sounding statements.[13][14]
I will note that a discussion was had on this over a decade ago (between people that no longer use Wikipedia). This discussion didn't really evolve into consensus, ending in disagreement between its two main participants: one insisting it unreliable, citing its promotional nature; while the other disputed this. @Czar has also questioned its reliability in a discussion from early 2019, but didn't go into much further detail than that it shouldn't be used for statements of fact.
Given these discussions were quite old and I wasn't able to participate in either, I thought I'd bring this up here. Does the Anarchist FAQ constitute a reliable source or is it questionable? Is there any content unique to the FAQ that might be missing from more clearly reliable sources? Are there cases that it could be reasonably used (e.g. for easily verifiable statements of fact, or with attribution for opinions)? Grnrchst (talk) 09:18, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello Grnrchst I think the AFAQ is a reliable source for social anarchist viewpoints that might be missing from more reliable academic sources. As for the AFAQ itself it does have some academic support which I believe increases its credibility more. The AFAQ has been regarded as “…very comprehensive…” by Graham, Paul; Hoffman, John. Introduction to Political Ideologies London: Pearson/Longman. (2006) pp 109 And as an "exemplar of the principles…” of community governing by Harvard resident fellow Joseph Reagle in: Why the Internet is Good - Community governance that works well Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Harvard Law School
(1998) Retrieved June 20, 2009 from: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html I think the AFAQ could generally be reasonably used in cases where social anarchist viewpoints are appropriate. I believe that it is unique in focusing on the history of anarchism and socialism from a social anarchist viewpoint. Centralia1 (talk) 01:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Viewpoint might not be the best word I used. Instead maybe I should say I think the AFAQ is a fairly credible resource that can be used when editing on Wikipedia in regards to social anarchism generally in my opinion. Centralia1 (talk) 03:39, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
@Tokisaki Kurumi: That's awesome! Thanks so much for doing this, it's a wonderful project. Unfortunately my Chinese comprehension only extends to "hello" and "goodbye", so I don't know how much help I'd be in translation, but I'm more than happy to help copy-edit. -- Grnrchst (talk) 22:56, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
@Czar It appears this started off as a stub about the mentioned book but then someone changed the scope to imply this was an actual tendency. The only scholarly reviews I've found that even mention the book are actually reviews of a different book written by one of the authors. The only secondary source listed in the article barely even references it in passing, in a footnote. This stub reads more-or-less like an advert for the book, not even really going into depth about what the book is about, so I'd support an AfD for this. -- Grnrchst (talk) 10:37, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
My understanding is it's a 'micro-ideology' based off of essentially one piece uploaded to T@L which attempted to synthesize Stirner with Anarcho-Communism into an ideology. This article would have my support to delete, i would have done it myself if I knew how. My personal opinion on this wider issue is that this is not the kind of thing in general we should entertain, i think these kind of 'meme politics' on wikipedia are actively harmful to the project and as well as lacking actual quality definitions of even prominent tendencies within anarchist milieus this kind of stuff leaves people coming away with a more incorrect understanding of the Anarchist space than before. I guess what i'm saying is that for this kind of extremely niche stuff, Be Bold; Bin it. :) SP00KYtalk01:48, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
I think we'll have an easier time weeding out the "meme politics" if we took a more hard line on sources. There are many ideology articles that consist largely of information cited to obscure anarchist pamphlets, magazines and even blog posts. It's difficult to gauge how relevant a "micro-ideology" is if there aren't any reliable secondary sources being cited anywhere in the article. -- Grnrchst (talk) 17:24, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Following on from our fun discussion about citogenesis about the term "Free Territory", I have become even more vigilant about the possibility of original research making its way into our articles. Recently, a discussion over on the talk page for Libertarian Marxism found little in the way of reliable sources on the subject. Information was either entirely unsourced, interpreting sources in such a way that failed verification (many never even using the term "libertarian", let alone "libertarian Marxism") or using unreliable sources (notably a Libcom.org blog post). In the end, we found little in the way of a true tendency that could be described as "Libertarian Marxism", with even reliable sources on the subject describing it more as an umbrella term than an actually definable tendency.
I bring this up here because, in going through this myself, I discovered a copious amount of original research in our article about libertarian socialism, itself a vital article. I've mentioned before that I really dislike writing about ideology on Wikipedia and this is one of the reasons why, as these kind of articles can be a magnet for original interpretation of sources. Would anybody here be able to help with cleaning up this article and verifying its cited sources? I'm starting to think this is a larger problem than one person can fix. -- Grnrchst (talk) 10:48, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
This one's quite messy. :) I don't recall on which talk page I said it, but I've long held that libertarian socialism should either become a disambiguation page for the different ideas it represents or, more simply, redirect to anarchism. It is most often covered in sources as a synonym for anarchism or as a descriptive term (i.e., a more libertarian form of socialism) and not as an independent school of thought with its own distinct history and proponents. It would make most sense to cover it in context of the articles.
Which brings us to the general predicament of these "ideology" articles. They were compiled with cut-and-paste copies from the ledes of related articles and ever since they deceivingly looked substantive enough to leave well alone, but on closer examination, the articles communicate nothing—they're glorified lists summarizing related but ultimately disparate concepts. They need to be rewritten to focus on secondary-source analysis about the article's discrete concept and its impact.
Many of the ideology articles are suffering from this currently, but libertarian socialism is among the worst off. It's definitely more than one person can fix. In my opinion, it needs either redirection (based on my reading of the sources in the definition article) or if it must be kept distinct, WP:TNT. czar06:16, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
It looks to me like the best move would be some form of merge, discarding the repeated stuff, across Anarchism and History of Anarchism. There are some things that the Libertarian socialism article explains more usefully than the main Anarchism article. Or at least, that's my sense from skimming them. I haven't gone any further with this idea than checking citations on Libertarian socialism to see if they're actually relevant - any further than that and I start to think "if you're in the mood to do writing/editing that is hard, shouldn't you be doing the writing that is your actual job?" and bail. So I hesitate to outright propose a merge knowing I'm unlikely to contribute much to it. Happy to pop in and check some sources though. -- asilvering (talk) 20:11, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
"If you're in the mood to do writing/editing that is hard, shouldn't you be doing the writing that is your actual job?"
I'm going to pin this to the wall in my office. It's also what makes me hesitant to really take on tackling this problem - I've got far more interesting and important tasks to do. :P Grnrchst (talk) 10:36, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
Reminds me of a certain ideology's "who will do the dirty work?" dilemma... :) My corrolary would be, if you're capable but not doing the writing/editing that is hard, who will? In my case it helps that I like this otherwise "dirty" work because it solves real problems. I try to do the "hard" stuff exclusively! czar14:36, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
@Czar: Yes I was talking about the libertarian socialism article, as the libertarian Marxism article no longer exists. I don't know if I agree that turning it into a disambiguation page is the right move. While libertarian socialism has indeed been used as a synonym for anarchism, it has also evolved to encompass more than just anarchism (See Kinna, et al. 2012). I think while dynamiting the entire article might be a bit hasty, I definitely think that taking a sledgehammer to its more egregious sections would be worth it.
Outside of the libertarian socialism article, I just stumbled upon the article about collectivist anarchism and noticed it was almost entirely unrelated to the subject. I went bold and cut everything but the lead (which upon inspection may also require some TLC) in order to build it up from scratch. I also noticed some original interpretation going on in the articles about anarchism without adjectives and synthesis anarchism - implying that the two tendencies were linked in a way that the cited source never did.
Now I'm left wondering how many of our articles about ideology have these problems, how many of them can be salvaged, how many are even worth salvaging. What you mentioned about ideology articles acting as compilations of leads for other articles is certainly a big problem. In a quick pass, I've noticed this issue with the articles about social anarchism, left-libertarianism, individualist anarchism, anarcho-communism, green anarchism, free-market anarchism. How many of these articles actually stand by themselves? How much of our project consists of articles summarising other articles that summarise other articles? It's the encyclopedic equivalent of an ouroboros. Grnrchst (talk) 10:34, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
My position is that nearly all of these "anarchist tendency"/"anarchist school of thought" ideology articles have the problems you mention and that almost all of them would be reduced to rubble in order to be rehabilitated. I already did this to some of the ideology articles some years ago for the easier ones. It's been this way for years and the solution is quite clear, which is why I don't think it's a "hasty" conclusion. The "compilation of leads" issue traces back to a single editor some years ago who made some bold edits and it would require some similarly bold edits to undo. We shouldn't be hesitant to do that (1) on principle, and (2) if it improves the articles. And in my take, these articles are virtually unreadable as is, so a reduction to what is verifiable analysis from reliable, secondary sources would be a sorely needed improvement. The best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago and the second best time is today. In my experience, after reducing those articles to sources about the concept itself, many won't have enough sources to support a dedicated article, which means that we should merge those sources and cover the concept in its parent article or a broader overview article or, as I suggested in this specific topic under discussion, a disambiguation page. czar14:15, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
Aye I agree with you completely here. I'm going to do my best to be bold and cut out the fluff where I see it. We'll see where we can take it from there, once we have stuff down to reliable sources.
The only article that I think makes any sort of sense to exist as one of these compilation-type things is the Anarchist schools of thought article, and even there that has issues if it's just going to amount to copy-pasted content. (I just found the entire article for anarcho-naturism was copy-pasted into the article for green anarchism)
To be clear, I don't think your conclusion was hasty, I more meant we need to be methodical about this. I've been accused of vandalism for removing poorly-sourced content before, so I want to make sure I'm doing this by the book.
At the end of the day, whatever we can do to make these articles more encyclopedic and less like political pamphlets, the better. -- Grnrchst (talk) 14:25, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
I haven't had time to do this yet but I'd like to revise Anarchism for FA and when doing so, I think it'll obviate the need for the dedicated "schools of thought" subarticle, which is (like the others), another compilation of lede paragraphs.
"Vandalism" gets thrown around on Wikipedia often but anyone who thinks that removing unsourced content is vandalism would be showing their unfamiliarity with the community's five pillars, one of which is verifiability: "The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material." If anyone gives you a hard time, let us know on this talk page (as a third party opinion, if need be) so we can back you up. czar14:44, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
Didn't take long for me to need to ask for a third opinion, and it's for a dispute over the term "free territory" again. *sigh* It's genuinely distressing to me how long this has been drawn out. All this time I've been going through sources to build out articles about the Makhnovists, and to be left arguing about a piece of terminology not used by any of them... Idk... -- Grnrchst (talk) 07:59, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
@Czar: Actually, I'm wondering if this might be a larger behavioural problem with the user pushing the issue. I noticed they added original research to the article on mutual aid and I removed it, causing another dispute. See the talk page there. For now, I'm going to disengage, as it doesn't seem like it's possible for me to have a productive conversation with them. -- Grnrchst (talk) 09:45, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
Welp. I am about a month into culling the OR from these articles and I am shocked at how much of a nothingburger many of them are turning out to be. So far I have removed roughly 80% of the articles on libertarian socialism, social anarchism and green anarchism due to a number of egregious issues. Whether it be sections that only exist to summarise other articles, text cited to sources that verifiably do not even imply what they're cited to, or text that is just flat-out irrelevant to the article.
It is frankly overwhelming that these articles managed to get this bad. With libertarian socialism and green anarchism, I've arrived at the point where I've pretty much cut everything that could be cut and have compiled sources that can be used to rebuild it (albeit much smaller than the previous versions). But with social anarchism, I'm wondering what the point of the article even is, as it seems like the term only exists in contrast to individualist anarchism (another article that needs cutting down). --Grnrchst (talk) 14:28, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
re: them getting bad, I think of it like a broken windows metaphor: If an article is a stub, readers will try to expand/grow it, but if it's long, even if it's unreadable (i.e., the broken windows), readers will tend to gloss and nitpick rather than attempt to overhaul. It's easier to add than to prune, and pruning gives the article room and likelihood to expand again.
re: these three, thanks for your work editing these down. I'd be surprised if the first two aren't merged elsewhere (as terms rather than traditions with distinct histories). Green anarchism has a bit more standing as a distinct tradition (with dedicated sources) rather than just a term but would need to be disentangled from how we cover primitivism, contemporary groups like the ELF, eco-terrorism, etc. czar16:53, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
I have now rebuilt the article on social anarchism and plan to move on to libertarian socialism and anarcho-communism soon. I'm trying to stick very strictly to sources that verifiably use the terminology of the subject, in order to keep it from spiralling into nonsensical OR. -- Grnrchst (talk) 18:44, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Do you see it having enough sourcing to justify a standalone article? It seems to me like it has significant scope overlap with anarchism and definition of anarchism and could be covered within there, based on the current content. czar05:20, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
Yeah I think so. All of the cited sources discuss "social anarchism" specifically and many at length. Think the main thing that separates this from "anarchism" is that this is the name for the non-individualist anarchist schools of thought. I personally found it profoundly uninteresting to research but I think the existence of a short, well-sourced article is better than its non-existence... and especially better than a long, meandering list with bad sourcing. -- Grnrchst (talk) 08:49, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
My research led me into a detour and I started reading into anarcha-feminism, which I found fascinating. So that article has now been almost completely rewritten and restructured, in order to hopefully make it a more broad overview of the subject rather than a series of foci about variously related individuals. Let me know if/where you think I've gone too far or haven't gone far enough. :) -- Grnrchst (talk) 17:40, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Now I really should be working on restructuring the article on anarcho-syndicalism for the WP:Labor Edit-a-Thon, but this morning I decided to take a peek at free-market anarchism and was shocked at how bad it was. I've just removed the entire history section because literally none of the sources referenced a "market anarchism" or any of its synonyms. There's honestly so little going on there that I'm once again wondering if this article even needs to exist. Maybe it does, I did find a couple reliable sources, but even those refer to it either as a very broad umbrella term or as synonymous with half a dozen other anarchist and left-libertarian schools of thought. -- Grnrchst (talk) 15:35, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Welp, I've cut down all of the synth that was propping up the "free-market anarchism" article and what is left is... not good. As @Asilvering mentioned above, the article was mostly just a bunch of various different topics incoherently mashed together. Without that, not much of quality is left.
I did manage to rebuild the insurrectionary anarchism article, from a confusing mess of quotes cited from insurrecto magazines to an actual article based on academic sources, so that's something. But I have very little interest in doing the same for the "free-market anarchism" article. Maybe someone will have the desire to go through the sources I left in the bibliography, but I really can't be bothered with such a strange ideological mish-mash. -- Grnrchst (talk) 19:24, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
As a matter of fact I have just been busy uploaded 'Quiet Rumours: An anarcha-feminist reader' to T@L. I do not know if that is useful to you but felt i would mention it just in case. x SP00KYtalk16:53, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Take care with "direct democracy"
I may have encountered another case of OR, which has possibly caused some citogenesis, that being anarchism's alleged affinity for direct democracy. I found that none of the cited sources, in either the articles on anarchism or direct democracy, actually reference a substantial connection between the two. Some never referenced "direct democracy" at all, or if they did, it was far from claiming it as a key principle of anarchism. I have removed the egregious claims and provisionally removed direct democracy from our categories and templates, as it appears as though it was another case of a term making its way in, nobody challenging it as it looks right, and it just staying there and expanding throughout the encyclopedia.
A wee look through the Palgrave Handbook shows that anarchist claims to direct democracy are, at the very least, contested. Lawrence Davis includes many an anarchist critique of direct democracy, stating that "direct democracy is not anarchism, inasmuch as the power of all is not equivalent to the power of none." Other references to "direct democracy" in the book are rather vague and only have a tenuous connection to anarchism.
If anybody has sources that do explore the connections between the two, please share them, as that'd be interesting to have a look at and add. But it appears that Wiki's existing understanding of the connection was based either on novel synthesis of sources or original research. -- Grnrchst (talk) 09:03, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Bookchin talks about Direct Democracy a fair bit, obviously if he really has anything for anarchists is very hotly debated but I think that would still be a good place to look. Also i was reading some Lorenzo Ervin recently who talks about 'Direct Democracy'. It is not an uncommon phrase in social anarchist circles, even to make sure i was not kidding myself i just searched 'Direct Democracy' with 'libcom' and a fair bit camed up.. ~~~ SP00KYtalk16:21, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Just noticed sections in the Democracy and Issues in anarchism articles aren't too helpful on this either. They're largely cited to primary sources and give off synth-y vibes. Highlighting these for now, but if nobody else is interested, I can see about rewriting them with better sourcing once I have less on my plate. -- Grnrchst (talk) 20:11, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
Project-independent quality assessments
Quality assessments are used by Wikipedia editors to rate the quality of articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.
No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.
However, if your project decides to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:53, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
No action/opting in sounds good to me. Not seeing a reason for us to be rating articles differently than other editors. But I'd like to bring up another discussion... czar23:59, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
I'll be happy with us opting in on this, as I rarely ever see WikiProjects rate individual articles independently of each other. Seems like a good idea to streamline it. Grnrchst (talk) 20:23, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
Support. This has come up a few times in the past with no real opposition but perhaps time to come to consensus. While the quality rating system has broad adoption across Wikipedia (see notice above), "importance" comes down to the individual project and I don't think we have a system nevertheless reason to categorize articles this way. We have vital article designation (WP:@/V) as providing a list of articles with the greatest perceived cultural importance for a Version 1.0 of Wikipedia, but beyond that it's not like determining whether a specific movement or article is "high" or "mid" importance has any impact on who edits what or what articles improve. As a worklist, I think we're sufficient to stick with the vital list and deprecate the "importance" rating from the banner. For anyone curious, I don't think any cleanup is needed—the banner would just stop recognizing that parameter and editors can naturally remove the extraneous parameters over time as talk pages are continually updated. czar23:59, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes. It is completely arbitrary and it does not actually have any function. It is just a thing you fill out for no reason but it is there and then never think about again (and even then i am pretty sure everyone else also just copies it from whatever other Wikiproject banners have it filled out). At least 'class' is used to attempt to measure something and to look at when improving the article. I see none of this for 'Importance', it to me as a relatively new editor it just feels like a relic left over from perhaps some time it did have a use. SP00KYtalk
Comment. I understand the motive to do this and am not wholly opposed to it. Although I think a different version of the importance rating could be useful, like a more temporal one that we can apply to articles that need urgent attention from others in the WikiProject - the tag can then be removed once it gets work. This would narrow it down to maybe a couple dozen articles that we want to temporarily highlight to each other. --Grnrchst (talk) 20:23, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
How would you define the need for urgent attention? I've seen other banners use that before but it's kind of hidden so it sits there and tends to languish. (I.e., all of the original research articles from the above discussion would be tagged but it doesn't mean anyone would know what to do with them.) If we want to go the banner route, I can set that to populate a category if that would be useful. Most effective, I've found, is to flag articles on this noticeboard/talk page or to hit em with a cleanup tag, which appears to get reviewed fairly regularly or at least has good visibility. czar18:13, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Seems like we still need to update the "Anarchism articles by quality and importance" table in the statistics section of our WP page, to remove the importance columns. I'd do it myself but I'm not confident enough in markup to try, I'm worried about breaking something. -- Grnrchst (talk) 10:13, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
I think that table is being built from the banner parameters as coded rather than as displayed, i.e., once the importance parameter is removed from the banner in each of those talk pages, I think it should resolve itself. There are ways to do that with WP:AWB but realistically the banner shell is about to be mass edited per the above notice, so I can see if it's possible to edit these parameters when that action takes place. Template talk:WikiProject banner shell#Migration timelineczar12:40, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
So it looks like the banner shell format mass migration won't happen for a while. If the quality/importance table not updating is particularly annoying for anyone, let me know and I can queue a bot task to remove the importance parameter from articles and fix the issue. Otherwise we can wait for the cleanup to run. czar05:08, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
If far-left exists, anarchism sits on it. It is something to rightfully reclaim, not endorse right-wing in besmirching it (and pushing people to the centrist status quo). I would prefer the term 'authentic left' if you will, because 'far' in 'far-left' promotes marginalization. –Vipz (talk) 02:49, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
With all due respect, we are wikipedians first and foremost, not anarchists. It is nor our job nor place to be reclaiming anything. SP00KYtalk02:26, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
Our 2022 thread of new book and journal article releases is about to age out, so thought I'd start a new thread for the first half of 2023. Feel free to add! czar06:47, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
Books and articles
Allison, Charles (June 2023). No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno. PM Press. – Press
Araiza Kokinis, Troy Andreas (June 2023). Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay, 1956–76. AK Press. ISBN978-1-84935-500-1. – Press
Baker, Zoe (July 2023). Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. AK Press. ISBN978-1-84935-498-1. OCLC1345217229. – Press
Branson, Scott (October 2022). Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life. Pluto Press. OCLC1304816739. – Press
D., Joni (January 2023). Agitated: Grupos Autónomos and Armed Anticapitalism in Spain, 1974–1984. Translated by Sharkey, Paul. AK Press. ISBN978-1-84935-431-8. – Press
Garner, Jason (2023). "The Revue International Anarchiste's World Survey (1924–1925): A Transnational Attempt at Reappraising, Revising, and Reinvigorating the Anarchist Movement". Journal for the Study of Radicalism. 17 (1): 1–26. Project MUSE888398.
Laursen, Eric (August 2023). Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr Alex Comfort, Author of the Joy of Sex. AK Press. ISBN978-1-84935-496-7. OCLC1345217286. – Press
Laursen, Ole Birk (June 2023). Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom. London: Hirst. ISBN978-1-78738-948-9. OCLC1346617283. – Press
Liang, Hongling (2023). "Education as Revolution: Theorizing Education and Learning in Xin Shiji (1907–1910)". Twentieth-Century China. 48 (2): 89–109. doi:10.1353/tcc.2023.0010. ISSN1940-5065 – via Project MUSE.
Lee, Chi Shing (2023). "The utopian homeland: new left internationalism, diasporic Chinese nationalism, and anarchism in Hong Kong, 1969–1973". The Global Sixties. doi:10.1080/27708888.2023.2203074.
Yeoman, James Michael (September 2022). Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915. Chico: AK Press. ISBN978-1-84935-458-5. – Previously published by Routledge, 2020
Book reviews
González, Gabriela (2023). "For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900—1938 by Sonia Hernández (review)". Southwestern Historical Quarterly. 126 (4): 591–593. doi:10.1353/swh.2023.0039. ISSN1558-9560 – via Project MUSE.
Peters, Benjamin (2023). "Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left by William Marling (review)". American Catholic Studies. 134 (1): 81–82. doi:10.1353/acs.2023.0003. ISSN2161-8534 – via Project MUSE.
Keeping in mind our recent systemic bias report, it would be very good for us to participate again and promote more women (and women's works) covered by our project. As such, I'm throwing together a wee list of things we could focus on. If anybody wants to adopt one of these, feel free, or if you have another article on mind, give it a mention!
I have a few in mind to take on that I'll comment on in a bit. Hope everyone's looking forward to this at least half as much as I am! :P -- Grnrchst (talk) 19:02, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
So I've already done a fair amount of work on a number of these articles. Right now, I think the ones on Fanya Baron, Maria Nikiforova, Ida Mett and Mollie Steimer are about as complete as can be, so I could very well submit those for GA review. I've also been meaning to do more work on anarcha-feminism, Kaneko Fumiko, Federica Montseny, Maria Lacerda de Moura, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Takamure Itsue and the Mujeres Libres, so this is a good chance to do that. We'll see if I can get them up to standard within the month. -- Grnrchst (talk) 19:12, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Take care with Libcom.org
I am once again advising caution due to concerns about citogenesis (I know, I know, it's getting old). Recently while I was working on the article about Olha Taratuta, I noticed that one of the main cited sources - Nick Heath's 2009 biography published on Libcom.org - cited the Esperanto Wikipedia as a source. I checked the article and found that Heath had seemed to pull much of his own article word-for-word from the EO Wiki article, to the point where I consider it bordering on plagiarism (even if he cited EO Wiki). Not long after Heath's article was posted on Libcom, the English Wikipedia article on Taratuta was created, citing Heath as a main source and thus introducing a lot of information from EO Wikipedia into EN Wikipedia. As the EO Wiki article he'd pulled from didn't cite its sources, it became immediately obvious just how much of the article was formed through citogenesis, so I took the steps to remove them from the article.
Since then, I've seen a similar (though not quite as bad) case with Ida Mett, this time Heath had closely paraphrased and copied text from the French Wikipedia article, although this time only one obvious case of citogenesis was found. This has made me worried about where else this has happened, as I've noted that Heath is cited in quite a number of articles throughout Wikipedia. I'm sure that not all of his works plagiarised Wikipedia (I just looked and am confident that his article on Fanya Baron wasn't) but this has made me concerned about the prevalence of citations to Libcom.org blog posts on here. We've certainly mentioned before that Libcom.org blog posts are not reliable sources, so I just wanted to make sure we reiterated that and really take care with citing them (if we must cite them at all). -- Grnrchst (talk) 12:45, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
I've got one worse: a Brill-published article I used several times ([16]) cites "Vikipediya: Svobodnaya Entsiklopediya". At least four people should have noticed that before me, and two of them were even being paid to do so. Sigh. Brill, man. -- asilvering (talk) 22:19, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
Strandzha and Manchuria
Hi everyone, hope you all are doing well this long, hot summer. I finally got around to working on the article about the Strandzha Commune, which had been sitting on my to-do list for far too long. The article is now much more filled out, although I'm sure I've left issues here and there, so any help fixing it up would be much appreciated! (Particularly if anyone has access to a paginated copy of Khadzhiev 1992 and can fill out specific page numbers, that would be awesome)
Also thought I'd take the opportunity to once again ask if anyone knows of any more sources on the Korean People's Association in Manchuria. I'm 99% sure I've exhausted all the existing English language sources and I can't read Korean, so I just wanted to double check because I'm thinking about possibly submitting it for GA review. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:42, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
I'm not convinced by the rights designations on the photos - they're marked as "life plus 70 years" but with an unknown author, so we have no evidence whatsoever that they died prior to 1953. An alert reviewer might take you to task for those. -- asilvering (talk) 21:43, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
Alternatively, you can just wait one more year and all the previously unpublished ones will be safe, thanks to the 120-years rule on unpublished unknowns! -- asilvering (talk) 21:45, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
Huh, I didn't actually know about the 120 year rule. Copyright law is so weird... Anyway, I'm still looking around for more sources on Strandzha, so I wasn't thinking about submitting that one for GA yet. Hopefully I'll have the article more rounded out by 2024! -- Grnrchst (talk) 11:23, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
Right, then it'd probably be a good idea to have a look around and see if we can find information about the photographers. Although considering how difficult it is to find information about the history, that'll probably be tricky. -- Grnrchst (talk) 11:25, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
There's an additional complication if the photographs were published at any point, so anything that looks like a scan from a book isn't going to fall into "unpublished - unknown author - 120 years after creation" or "unpublished - known author - 70 years after death of author". There's a really clear and helpful chart here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Hirtle_chart. Clear and helpful by copyright law standards, anyway. -- asilvering (talk) 00:25, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
And the copyright status of originating countries certainly gets blurry very quickly. Whether it be the uprising against the Ottomans in Strandzha, the civil war in Ukraine, the association in Manchuria or the revolution in Spain, many of the states that these photographs were taken in no longer exist... -- Grnrchst (talk) 10:58, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
Honestly at that point you're probably fine just going by the US copyright (who's going to sue?), but I'd try the Commons help desk first. -- asilvering (talk) 05:21, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
@Charles Essie: I've been following this group for a while, but honestly, I wouldn't know where to start with adding information to this. Coverage of them outside of anarchist media has been spotty at best and in what form they actually exist is still unclear (their "anti-authoritarian battalion" didn't last long and their members mostly dissolved into other units). To be honest, I would recommend moving what information you can to the anarchism in Ukraine article and waiting to see how the situation with the RC develops before trying to get an article about them up on the encyclopedia. In the meantime, our article on Finbar Cafferkey has room for further improvement and I'm looking into getting an article up about Dmitry Petrov [uk] as well. -- Grnrchst (talk) 14:16, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
Actually, it looks to me like your draft is ready to go, from an AfC perspective, if you want to resubmit it? A decision about whether it ought to have a standalone article or be summarized into Anarchism in Ukraine is somewhat beyond the scope of AfC if the sources show significant independent coverage. -- asilvering (talk) 22:12, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
