Jimmy Wales wrote:
The fine communists over at
marxists.org have
approached me about the
possibilities of sharing content. They have a lot of content that's
under the GNU FDL, and they've expressed an interest in putting it
into the wikipedia.
I was brutally honest with them about my own personal opinion of
Marxism, which is quite low, and they were more pleasant to me in
return than I deserved. I recommended that they subscribe to this
list to chat about how best to put their stuff into the wikipedia.
I recommended that they might want to add just a few articles a day
for as long as it would take, rather than dumping everything in at
once. This would give people a better chance to respond.
I'm just saying this now to invite everyone to go take a look at
their site, so that we can have intelligent comments for them.
I speak as a person who believes that Marxists have gotten a bad rap
over the years, and that they failed because they antagonized people
with big vested interests in keeping the economic system just as it is
so that it can keep producing economic wonders like Enron.
I'm impressed with the democratic philosophy that they apply to the
operation of their site. They even include detailed reports on their
internal financial operations. The kind of dispute they had over
developing their Chinese language version seems to be just the kind of
arguments that we often have among Wikipedians. They should fit in very
well.
Their site includes the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA), a series of
important E-texts relevant to their interests. This already
includes.the first 30 volumes of the collected works of Lenin. They
would need to understand that we are not a Guttenberg style repository
of E-texts.
One other thing that I've noticed over the years about dedicated Marxist
volunteers is their immense capacity for work thankless in the face of
overwhelming odds. They also have a sense of humour. -- very important
for survival on Wikipedia! This quote is from their web site.
Lastly, this year saw two MIA volunteers suffer
devestating injuries
due to their volunteer work. While typing away feverishly at email
correspondence, one of our volunteer's hands locked shut. He aquired
severe tendonitis, caused by endless seams of email correspondence and
transcribing documents by hand, leaving him crippled and unemployed
for nearly a year, though still continuing to volunteer through speech
recognition technology. Trajedy struck another volunteer in the
summer, after staring at the computer screen for hour after hour,
proofing piles of digital transcriptions, fissures began to form in
his retina, breaking his eye sight down further and further until he
was no longer able to view the screen for more than several minutes.
He was forced to leave the archive, after trying at great lengths to
keep up with MIA correspondence and archive work. Please, everyone,
practice smart erogonomics <http://www.tifaq.com/> when working on the
computer!
Let's do our best to welcome them.
Eclecticology